


I Hope You Make It To The Day

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-16 08:08:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5820784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She used to dream about a boy filled with stars, when she was younger. Just a child, no older than eight. He would come and spend time in her dream world with her, teaching her to skip rocks that glowed in the dark and didn’t obey gravity the way they would in real life. He told her stories about ancient kings and princesses, and a woman with hair made of snakes. His voice never sounded quite right, though—he spoke with windchimes in his mouth.</p><p>Clarke hadn’t even thought about the dream boy in years, not until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Thinking Of The Night Song

**Author's Note:**

> ok look. i'm sorry. i suck, just in general, but especially when it comes to finishing things. i'm going to do my best, here. 
> 
> i have an excess of useless knowledge about obscure divination methods that i had to put somewhere, alright?

When Clarke is seven years old, she kills a man. She doesn’t mean to, but the thing about death, she’s learned, is that it doesn’t matter one way or another if you _mean_ to. It just happens. She didn’t mean to kill the man, but she did, and he died, and now every year she sends a birthday card to a little boy she’s never met—he’d be twenty-nine years old by now, so hardly a boy at all—filled with savings bonds that he might not ever end up using.

She visits the grave when she can, when her stomach’s feeling brave enough, but she thinks about the man every day. Each morning she wakes up and she wears that fact like a dress or a sweater, coating her skin with its sticky invisible film. It’s just another thing about her—Clarke Griffin, 5’5”, psychic, murderer.

Wells thinks that’s why she wanted to stay on the mountain, but it isn’t, not really—although it certainly is the reason she stayed. The truth is, she doesn’t think she deserves to leave. She shouldn’t have a fresh start, no clean slate or new beginning. She shouldn’t be allowed to run from what she’s done. She’s already managed to get away with it, with burying the corpse in the woods, to rot under fertilizer and marigolds. She shouldn’t be able to leave the bones behind, too.

The boy, Cage Wallace, just twelve when she killed his father, has never sought Clarke out or tried to find her. She worried about that at first, worried that the extra stamps and the fake return address might not be enough of a barrier. She’d sort of anticipated it, too, the eventuality of being found out. She made a promise to herself that if she ever saw him coming up the driveway, stack of envelopes and questions in hand, she’d turn herself in. She’d tell them all everything.

But he never showed, and there were no questions. She has no way of knowing if her letters even arrive. She has Wells check on him every now and then, through the database at work. As it turns out, the U.S. Postal Service is just one step down from the FBI, when it comes to tracking people down. She knows his address, his phone number, his blood type, his credit score. She knows he works at some sort of corporate office that does insurance billing, that he’s never been married or claimed any children, that he lives alone in a high-rise in some city with a population bigger than most. She can imagine the rest; his father’s hair was already going white when she met him, so she pictures a middle-aged man with a dry-cleaned plain suit, salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes sad with loss.

“You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know,” Wells sighs, as she sticks a third stamp on the corner, this one from Beirut. She puts the return address somewhere in California. She was perusing vineyard sites the night before, and still has Napa Valley on the mind. “He’s probably moved on by now.”

“I know,” she says simply, because she does. It should bother her, she knows, that this man, who she’d known for all of four and a half minutes before his death, has affected her more than her own father. But her own father didn’t die under her touch, didn’t die _because_ of her touch. “But I haven’t.”

Wells just sighs and stamps the envelope, like always. He’s the only postmaster in town, since Nyko retired, and the only notary, too. It isn’t so impressive, in a town of only three hundred and eighty-two, but. It’s worth something, at least.

It’s worth something that he stayed.

Wells was always the type of person everyone assumed would _make it big_. He’d graduate and get into Harvard or Berkeley or Yale, and study something that had to do with politics or international business—something that got him a job with the president, or access to a private jet. He’d show up in Time Magazine as the obligatory _small town boy takes on the big city_ story, and Cece would frame the cover and hang it up above the bar.

But instead, Wells graduated and he got into Harvard _and_ Berkeley _and_ Yale, but he didn’t go to any of them. He took classes online, and ordered textbooks on all sorts of things from Amazon. He went everywhere with a book under his arm, always studying, soaking up the knowledge like a sponge until he was basically an encyclopedia. The Jaha mansion’s whole left wing has become an unofficial library, with local kids and even some teachers showing up to borrow from Wells’s personal cache.

And so now he’s the _small town boy who gave up everything for a girl_ story, except that’s not quite right either. It is, of course, in the literal sense, and Clarke wishes that’s all that mattered. But people hear _for a girl_ and they say _for love_ , and when they say _for love_ , what they really mean is _for romance_ —and that’s not what this story is, at all. Because Clarke knows romance, she knows the vicious grip of it, like fingernails raked down the skin of her sides, like rose bushes twisted through the gaps in her ribcage, threatening to puncture her lungs with each breath, and that’s never been her and Wells. She and Wells have always been the two sides of a chessboard, the Best Man at a wedding, the sticky pinky promise on a playground to never grow up.

He’s the _small town boy who helped his best friend hide a dead body_ story, and those words make her skin itch every day.

“Got another post card from Raven,” he says, once he’s tossed Clarke’s envelope into the _out_ bin.

The post office is a single room; there isn’t much, in the way of a filing system. In the back, there are half a dozen columns of milk crates overturned and stacked on top of each other to form shelves, where Wells sorts the mail alphabetically. Anything that doesn’t fit in the milk crates usually just gets sent through UPS, but once he received a small washing machine that old Mrs. Hetty ordered through the Sears catalogue.

“Where is she this time?” Clarke asks, and Wells fetches the post card from a drawer in his desk. It’s a garish hot pink color, a bloody magenta, with WHO KNOWS? RENO! in huge glossy letters on the front.

“Well, she _was_ in Nevada,” Wells muses, and Clarke knows what he means. Raven never stays very long in one city; by the time her message arrives, she’s already somewhere new. They’ve sent out a few replies before, but they always get returned.

“I hope she’s not counting cards again,” Clarke sighs. The last time had been in Detroit, and Raven nearly lost her leg because of it. She’d sent them a letter after the fact, which read like some James Patterson novel.

“No criminal activity mentioned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” He passes the card over so she can skim it. It’s perfunctory, as always, with Raven’s messy and nearly illegible scrawl. The ink changes color halfway through, like her first pen ran out of ink or something. Nothing important, just a few jabs at the casino food, and a poor attempt at a doodle. Of what, Clarke isn’t sure, but she’s pretty convinced it’s wearing stilettos.

Raven is the only other person who knows about the man buried in Clarke’s backyard. She might have stayed in the mountains with them, but they’d practically begged her to go. They’d even packed her bags for her, because they didn’t trust her not to stay, to hide herself in one of their closets and pop out while they were asleep, to shout _Boo! Ha, really got you that time, huh?_ She had a full ride to MIT, and they’d be _damned_ if she didn’t take it. Clarke wasn’t sure she could handle costing twice as much potential to be lost and poured down the drain.

“Let me know if she sends anything else,” she says, sliding the card back to Wells so he can put it with the others in his scrapbook. Wells likes to scrapbook, and has an on-going one for every occasion.

“Will do,” he promises, and goes back to sorting bubble-wrapped packages as Clarke turns to leave, tinny bell ringing behind her.

Mount Weather is a small town in population, but covers a hundred miles of the dense mountain forest. It’s newly autumn in the Blue Ridge, which means everything smells like wet leaves, loblolly pine, and the crisp edge of fresh death. Death isn’t a hard smell to decipher, once you know what to look for. The scents of evergreen trees and fog, a little bit of mildew, and cool wet cement. It feels like the underside of a mushroom, those soft little ribbons so delicate they break at just one touch. The waxy stretch of a butterfly wing, moist and helpless. Death feels like things that are easily broken, but Clarke knows better by now. Death is the strongest thing there is.

 Clarke lives at the edge of the town limits, her house nearly swallowed up by the trees. There’s a spring that runs through her yard, which she sometimes uses for scrying, and a wall of stones with natural-borne holes through their middles, that act as a sort of veil. She has wind-chimes of tree bark and hollowed robin’s eggs and bones nicked up from the neighborhood strays. She has spider plants and mountain ferns and rosemary, dangling in pots from the ceiling. She has dried herbs all along the kitchen counter, and a deck of cards that she painted herself. Raven used to call the Griffin home a witch’s cottage, and while witchcraft isn’t _exactly_ the right word, Clarke has to admit she more than fits the image. All she’s missing is the hat.

She puts the kettle on immediately, because by now her blood is mostly herbal tea, she drinks so much of it. Wells isn’t coming over for dinner, which means she doesn’t have to make a salad, and instead just pours one of those boxes of shaped macaroni into the pot.

Someone who didn’t really understand Clarke might call her life on the mountain _lonely_ , but they’d be wrong. She isn’t lonely. She has Wells, and she has her mother whenever Abby swings through town to visit, and she has Lexa in a roundabout way, and she still has Raven sort of, and she has herself. She doesn’t need much else; she doesn’t need to be greedy.

Clarke eats her dinner and drinks her tea in front of the television. _Wheel of Fortune_ is on, and she likes to guess the landings, just for fun. She doesn’t need anyone to share this with. There isn’t much to share, anyway.

And if—sometimes, when she has a little too much cider, and her mind is in that blurred stage where the whole world feels warm and foggy and _possible_ —Clarke wishes her bed wasn’t so cold, and her house wasn’t so empty, and she wasn’t so _alone_ , well. That’s mostly the alcohol talking.

Because there’s a difference between _lonely_ , and _alone_ , and Clarke’s used to being on her own. She’s grown accustomed to it.

She dreams of water, which isn’t unheard of. Water can mean so many things. Oneiromancy is fickle by nature; dreams are so fluid, and fleeting, and easily misread. They’re not her favorite things to interpret.

But she dreams of water—specifically salt water, from the sea or a lake or river, she can’t be sure. She isn’t sure that part is important, but when it comes to dreams, most things are. The dream world is dark, the deep blue that comes just before nighttime, where everything is bathed in shadow.

The water itself is coarse with salt, and thick, like blood. Clarke can’t see herself, but she can feel the slickness of it on her skin. And then she feels the warmth, as it begins to bubble, boiling all around her knees, like a million sun-warmed pennies pressed against her flesh.

Clarke tips her dream head back until she can see the sky—but instead of the moon, there’s a man. His face turns towards her and she can see the outline of full lips, the dark hollows of his eyes, the slope of his nose, an indented chin. The stars fill up his skin like freckles, masking him with constellations.

The water goes still, and for a moment Clarke just stands and breathes in the dream air. Everything is cool, and smells of anise, like her grandmother’s kitchen.

Then the water pulls her under.

Clarke wakes up gasping, sheets soaked and sticking to her skin, hair wet from her sweat, and tangled. It’s been a few months since the last nightmare, and she hasn’t missed this part; the trouble breathing, the constant ache of telling herself everything’s fine, when it isn’t.

And then she hears the door shut.

Like most homes on the mountain, Clarke’s house has a wooden and storm door, for hurricane season. They hardly ever get any this far inland, but North Carolina is a coastal state, and the rain can be heavy enough to flood. The storm door also acts as a sort of warning system—it’s metal, and heavy, slamming shut and creaking open, alerting her each time it’s being used.

She keeps a baseball bat by the bedside table, from her high school softball days. Her whole team signed it, the year she graduated, and though the markered names have faded, the wood is strong and whole. She grips it as she pads around the corner, moving through the bathroom to catch the intruder off-guard.

She should probably feel terrified, or at least a little scared, but instead she mostly just feels determined. She’s never been robbed before, and she doesn’t plan to start now.

And after all, it’s not like she’s never killed before.

Clarke presses her back against the tile, cool on her overheated skin and tank top. She breathes through her mouth, shallow and steady so it can’t be heard, and watches through the crack in the door as the shadows move in the hallway. They’re walking, and they’re not bothering to be quiet about it, which probably isn’t a good sign. If they meant to wake her, it means they’re not just after the spare change she keeps in the mason jars, right? What if this isn’t a burglary, but a home invasion? Clarke grips the bat tighter, pulls it back over her shoulder, and slips through the door in one breath.

“Jesus Christ, what the _fuck_ , Griffin?” Raven shouts, stumbling back and just barely dodging Clarke’s swing. The bat knocks into the wall, cracking the drywall like an eggshell. Flakes of teal paint and a few picture frames fall to the floor.

“Raven?” She sets the bat down on the floor, and squints at her, eyes still adjusting to the light. “What are you doing here?”

“What, did you rescind that open invitation?” Raven smirks, but there’s a nervous edge to her, like she keeps expecting another bat to come swinging for her head.

“No,” Clarke says, reaching for her. “Never. I just didn’t know you were coming.”

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” Raven says, voice muffled by Clarke’s shoulder. She holds her back just as tight, and Clarke breathes her in.

It’s been years since she saw her best friend, but she still smells the same—like cinnamon and chamomile and engine grease. “Welcome home.”

Raven eyes the bat a little pointedly as she pulls away. “Warm welcome.”

Clarke winces. “Sorry, I thought you were—someone else. Why are you back in Mt. Weather?”

Raven shrugs a little too nonchalantly, and starts picking at her nails, one of her most obvious tells. This is why no matter how good at counting cards she is, Raven always gets caught; she’s never been very good at lying. “Maybe I just missed you guys. How is Jaha, anyway?”

“You’d know if you’d ever stay long enough to get our letters,” Clarke says, with maybe a little more bite than she’d intended, but—it hurt, a little, when Raven left. Not because she got out, not because she followed her dream; Clarke would never begrudge her that. But she never called, and if she did it was for just a few minutes because it was from some payphone on a busy street, so Clarke could only half-understand her, anyway. And she never stayed in one place, so their letters were always returned. Even the postcards weren’t much; four or five sentences about nothing at all, some shitty drawing she probably did while she was drunk in a Motel 8.

It hurt because when Raven left Mt. Weather, she left Clarke and Wells too, and she didn’t even seem to notice.

“Yeah, well,” Raven shifts uncomfortably, and there’s the creak of a metal hinge. Clarke glances down towards the sound, to see a brace buckled around her left leg. It doesn’t look like a cast. It doesn’t look at all temporary. “You know what they say; a rolling stone gathers no moss. And we both know I’m not the best with nature.” As if to prove her own point, she scrunches her nose up at the pitcher of dried hyssop Clarke has sitting on the shelf.

“Raven, what happened?” Clarke can’t stop staring at the brace. This is _Raven Reyes_ , captain of the girls’ varsity basketball team, all-star track runner; she took a break dancing class at the gym just because it sounded like _fun_.

She’d told them she’d almost lost her left leg, but _handled it_. Clarke takes in the metal spider legs wound around the limb. It doesn’t look _handled_ , to her.

Raven rolls her eyes. “Don’t start, Griffin. I’m fine.” She limps over towards the kitchen, leg stiff and mostly immobile. She must have spent some time, relearning how to walk on it. Clarke watches her root through all the cupboards, probably in search of coffee, which she takes black and sludgy, like something out of one of the cars she worked on in her spare time.

Clarke makes no move to help her; if she tried, Raven would just wave her off, even though it’s been _years_ since she’s been in this kitchen. The last time, she was newly eighteen, and it was the night before she left for Cambridge. Her foster mom, Nygel, moved after that and as far as Clarke knows, hasn’t had any contact with her since, which is just as well. Nygel had a grin that made Clarke's scalp itch.

“Jesus, don’t you have _any_ organizational skills?” Raven grouses, letting the fifth cupboard fall shut.

Clarke points to the first cupboard. “Teas that influence love and relationships,” she points to the next. “Herbs for divining and aiding success; ingredients for protection charms and harmony; things that help intuit and inspire.”

Raven points at the next cupboard, a little exasperated. “Let me guess—hot chocolate that lets you communicate with the dead?”

Clarke bites back a grin and shakes her head. “That’s where I keep the soup bowls.”

“This is ridiculous,” Raven grumbles, finally finding the instant coffee Clarke keeps around just for her, just in case. To be honest, she’s not sure if the grounds have expired or not, but Raven probably won’t care. Clarke’s seen her microwave week-old coffee that she forgot about, and chug it all down in one go.

“Does Wells know you’re here?” She slides up on the counter, watching as Raven scoops a spoonful of grounds into an old, chipped mug, and starts to boil water in the kettle. She still moves a little rigidly, and each time her brace squeaks, Clarke has to force herself not to wince. Raven refuses to look up from her hands.

“No,” she admits, soft, like she’s embarrassed. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Raven,” Clarke starts, just as quiet. It’s still the middle of the night, and except for the sound of water beginning to bubble on the stove, everything is silent; the physical sort of soundless, that feels like a blanket perched on their shoulders, like if they jostle it too much with words, it might fall off. “Why are you here?”

She sighs, shooting Clarke a rueful grin over the rim her mug, still steaming. “Sometimes, shit just happens, you know?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, kicking her bare heels against the cabinets in thought. “But why here? Why now? It’s—” she checks her watch, the worn leather flaking against her wrist, just to be sure. “Three in the morning, Raven.”

“You used to say three was a good number,” Raven shrugs, sipping her coffee. “Threes, sevens and nines.”

“If you’d shown up at nine o’clock, I wouldn’t have tried to hit you with a bat,” Clarke says wryly, and Raven grins.

“But where’s the fun in that?”

She’s so clearly talking around the subject, and Clarke would have even let her. She would have found out on her own eventually, anyway, like she always does. But then Raven sighs, setting her mug down on the counter.

“I got in some trouble.”

Clarke nods, having suspected as much. “Is it those guys? The ones from Detroit, with your—leg?”

Raven shakes her head, rubbing two fingers against her temple, like she’s trying to coax a migraine away. “Reno. I figured—Reno’s not Las Vegas, you know? Less to gamble, so less risk. But these guys, they’re dangerous. They’re,” she hesitates, looking up to meet Clarke’s eyes. She doesn’t look _scared_ , not really, but then Raven never does. She looks anxious though, which is new. Clarke didn’t know there was a type of danger that Raven didn’t laugh at. “Serious,” she decides. “They mean business. And their business involves a lot of body bags.”

“Okay,” Clarke says, struggling through the word a little. She seen enough death to become accustomed to it; buried rats and roadkill and strays who came into her yard to die. Buried a man beneath the flowerbeds. But there’s something about death out loud, that feels different. Unnatural. Like they shouldn’t be mentioning it at all.

She feels like a little girl again, at a sleepover in the sixth grade, locked in a bathroom with the lights out, staring at the shadowed mirror. _Say the name three times and she’ll appear_. It was a silly superstition, an urban legend with no truth. Clarke _knew_ magic, she knew what it might take to draw a spirit out of glass, and still she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She cheated, said the name twice and a half, or said _Bloody Miranda_ , instead. She didn’t want to chance it, told herself it wasn’t worth the risk, when really she was just being a coward.

Raven always said the name three times. She laughed as she did it. She was always laughing in the face of death, and that worried Clarke, because she knew death didn’t have a sense of humor.

“I figured I’d hide out here for a few days,” Raven continued, picking at her nails again, like she actually thought Clarke might say _no_. “Just until things die down, and they forget about me.”

“You’re hard to forget about,” Clarke teases. “But yeah, of course. I only have the pull-out, though.”

Raven shrugs, throwing back the rest of her coffee, cooled by now, like a shot of tequila. “Works for me.” She hands her emptied mug over without a word, and Clarke bites back a grin, as she takes it.

They did this before, when they were younger. It’s always been tricky; tasseography is meant to be done with tea leaves, not coffee grounds. But Raven never liked tea, so Clarke made do. She twisted the mug this way and that, before finding the right positioning, studying the specks of black caught in the bottom and rim, resettling into the language, like when she’s gone too long without studying French, and has to remind herself of the grammar.

“See this?” she tilts the mug so Raven can see the grainy m symbol, on the side. “It means mountain. Or bird, I guess, but probably mountain, all things considered. And that,” she points to a clump of grounds that vaguely resemble the Olympic circles. “That means a series of events. And _this_ ,” she grazes her finger along the rim, where a tiny black x has made its home. “Means caution, or stop.” She looks up to find Raven watching her, amused.

“So, mountain, series of events, stop,” she recites, ticking each meaning off on a finger. “Maybe I should just stay inside all day tomorrow, so I don’t set any nefarious things in motion.” She waggles her fingers spookily, and Clarke rolls her eyes, hopping down.

She sets the mug in the sink, to be washed out tomorrow. “Raven Reyes, if you weren’t out getting in trouble, you’d probably die.” Raven doesn’t bother denying it.

Clarke fetches some bedsheets from the linen closet, along with one of the quilted pillows Wells gave her one Christmas, with a bunch of corgi’s in party hats on the front. She carries them out to the living room, where Raven’s already yanked the mattress out of the paisley sofa, and is now taking off her brace.

It’s hard to watch, but harder to look away, so Clarke waits as Raven unbuckles the contraption and sets it aside, reaching into the worn rucksack for her pajamas—a pair of threadbare cotton shorts and a tank too big and sagging to cover much of anything that matters.

“Goodnight,” Clarke says, once they’ve gotten the fitted sheet on. Raven catches her arm as she passes.

“Clarke,” she says, looking more serious than Clarke has ever seen her. “Thanks.”

Clarke hums, bending down to press a kiss to her hair. It smells like cheap motel shampoo, and a little like dirt. “Don’t think about it. Goodnight.”

When she dreams this time, it’s of an apple. She watches as slim, weathered hands carve the skin off in rings with a paring knife, light strained and dappled through the bay window. It’s her grandmother’s kitchen, and the hands belong to her. Clarke hasn’t seen her since she was little, just six years old. She looks around the room, blinking in the sunlight; this dream world is as bright as the other was dark, as warm as the other was cool. There’s the sound of a running faucet, washing the blackberries picked from the yard.

Her eyes land on the tarot cards, edges ripped and worn through over the years, pictures faded and outdated, but still well-used. Clarke reaches out a hand to smooth over the deck, spreading them out along the table.

“Careful, sky girl,” Anya warns, and Clarke turns back to her. _Sky girl_. She used to call her that, when she was young, with her head always up in the clouds, and her eyes two blue pocketfuls of horizon. “Don’t get flour on them.”

Clarke looks down at her hands, to find them coated in white powder, making them itchy and dry. Suddenly she can smell the dough, warm and baking in the oven, and she grins. “You’re making fortune cookies.” Anya smiles; they were her favorites, and Anya always made them with her, when she came to visit.

She’d write out special fortunes for her to find when she cracked them open— _you will find an enchanted flower. press the petals to your lips for good luck._ Clarke kept the papers taped up on her wall, like an abstract poem. Prophecies In Fifteen Words: A Series.

They never came true, and then Anya died, and Abby had never been fond of fortunes.

But this isn’t a memory—Clarke is too old, and Anya is too young, much younger than she was when Clarke last saw her. She watches the ribbon-red skin spiral and fall. Anya moved along to the core, prying the seeds out one by one, to make poison with, later.

This is a dream, and dreams always mean something. “Why are you here?” Clarke asks.

“There is a word inside each of us that we cannot pronounce,” Anya says. It sounds familiar, though Clarke knows she’s never heard her grandmother say it. It sounds like something out of a book. “That is who we are.”

“What does that mean?”

Anya shrugs. The apple has become an orange, but not quite. The peel is too thin, too easily sliced through. It looks like a fruit that doesn’t exist. “It means what you need it to mean,” she says, pragmatic as always. “That is the nature of words.”

“Are you here to give me a message?” Clarke tries. Sometimes dreams need help, to be pointed in the right direction. They get turned around on their own, and confused, becoming a Kandinsky piece, if she isn’t careful. The faucet is getting louder, water gushing out impossibly fast, washing the berries down the drain in a pool of purple-black sludge.

Anya sets the strange dream orange down to look at her, and then presses the knife to her finger, paring the skin off with ease. “I already have.”

Clarke wakes to the smell of coffee, and what might be Raven’s attempt at fresh tea, although it smells burnt. It used to be her rosemary-lavender blend, she’s pretty sure.

She finds Raven in the kitchen, making scrambled eggs on the stove in her pajamas.

“This is new,” Clarke muses, and Raven swears as she burns herself on the frying pan. “Last time I saw you, you caught toasters on fire.”

“Still do,” Raven chirps, prying a batch of only _slightly_ overcooked eggs off with a spatula. “But stoves, I can manage.”

Almost as if on cue, the smoke alarm goes off, and Raven glares up at it like it has personally betrayed her.

They eat dinner out on the porch, because Clarke has a nice set of wicker furniture that deserves to be used, and because both of the tables inside are covered with card decks, plant seed packets, pouches of dried herbs for tea and poultices, incense sticks and jars of oils and essences.

“You used to be such a neat freak,” Raven grumbles, licking the olive oil from her fingertips. “What _happened_?”

Clarke shrugs, wiping some yolk from the corner of her mouth. “I realized that cleaning sucks, and I didn’t have to do it.”

Raven clacks their mugs together. “To adulthood,” she cheers, wry, and Clarke grins.

“You should go visit Wells today,” she says, trying for casual but missing the mark. Raven snorts knowingly.

“Subtle. Why, what are you up to?”

“Working,” Clarke shrugs. Most of her clients prefer to have their readings done at her house, which is better for her anyway. It uses less gas, and she has access to all her supplies. “I have a few meetings today.”

“Got it,” Raven grins, gathering up the dishes. She really is a very good houseguest. She even sort of made her bed that morning—by which, she tossed her bedsheets in a clump on one of the easy chairs, and folded the mattress back up into the couch. “I’ll scram.”

“You don’t have to—” Clarke starts, but Raven cuts her off with a roll of her eyes.

“Relax, Griffin. I’m a guest, I know. But it’s been a while, and I want to check out the sights, see if they demolished that old warehouse everyone used to hook up in.”

Clarke makes a face. “It’s hardly a _warehouse_ —it was a carpentry plant.”

“Filled with used condoms and spray paint cans galore.”

She does leave soon after, probably to try to break into the old high school gym again, like they did when they were teenagers, and Clarke sets out tidying up the dining room table, for her first appointment. Mostly, she just shoves everything into random drawers and bookshelves, so she’ll forget where everything is for the next few days and spend an recommended amount of time searching for them.

She googles the quote from her dream, the one Anya told her, while she waits. It’s from a book she’s never heard of, about Chechnya, published in 2013, well after her grandmother’s death. She thinks about buying the book, just to see if there’s anything else she might find in its pages, to make sense of her dream.

Maya Vie has Clarke read for her every Sunday morning, just before noon. She’s a quiet, shy girl who works at the elementary school, and she’s partial to bibliomancy, and brings her own books—any that pop out at her from the shelves at her work. Clarke spreads the books along her table, and blindfolds Maya before she has her flip through the pages, pointing to different lines. Clarke copies them down on a legal pad, and then reads through them, like an enormous anagram puzzle.

After Maya, it’s Monroe, who’s new to the practice, so Clarke takes her through a simple tarot reading, and then fetches a candle and bowl of ice water. Cerscopy is simple enough, just pouring melted wax into the water, and easy to read. It’s like a beginner’s book, with big block print and pictures.

Her last appointment comes in the afternoon, a last-minute call-in from the day before, some man named Tristan who’s just passing through the area, and wants his palm looked at. Palmistry has never been a big draw for Clarke, and to be honest she’s a little excited to try it out.

Tristan arrives at four o’clock exactly, with eyes she can’t read and an unlined face. He shakes her hand with both of his, and when she pulls back, she sees her watch has stopped.

 _Trust your instincts, sky girl_ , Anya’s voice whispers through her head. Clarke leads Tristan to the table, but each time she glances at him from the corner of her eye, she sees a snake, in his place. A Kingsnake, with heavy black scales and thick coils, ready to strike, waiting.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch where you were from,” she says, keeping her voice light as she reaches for his hand.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” he says, letting her take it. “Nevada. Reno.”

Clarke schools her expression, keeping her eyes on the lines in his skin. His hands are enormous; twice the size of hers. It would be so easy for him to wrap one around her neck. She keeps her heart steady. “Biggest little city?”

Tristan smiles thinly. “That’s the one.” His hand twitches under her fingers, like he’s having trouble keeping still. “See anything of interest?”

Clarke hums. She sees a lot of things. She sees that he’s thirty-six years old, nearly thirty-seven. She sees that he’s an older brother of two, with one parent dead and the other one missing. She sees that he’s never fallen in love, and isn’t planning to. She sees that he’s never felt much in the way of emotions, beyond anger and indifference. She sees that he gets a manicure once a week, sometimes more depending on his work hours. She sees his job does involve a lot of body bags, and tire irons, and aluminum bats, and hammers. She sees that he likes to kill with his hands, so he can feel it better. She sees he likes to be touched, in the way a cat might, but only on his terms.

She tells him only the briefest details, the ones he already knows and will accept without question. And then she recommends he get a houseplant.

“A what?” He’s clearly bemused by the tiny psychic girl, housing the card counter he’s been sent to murder.

“Probably something simple,” she shrugs. “Like a cactus, or a spider plant. They have cacti in Nevada, right?”

“They do.” She lets go of his hand, and he clenches his fist tightly, cracking each knuckle in turn. It feels less like a warning, and more like a promise. This is not a rattlesnake, shaking its tail. This is something darker.

He pays her rate in cash, plus a thirty dollar tip, which Clarke slips into her pocket. “Thank you Miss Griffin. This has been a great pleasure.”

“Always happy to help,” she says, and locks the door behind him, watching from the window as he stalks towards his rental car. At least, she thinks it’s a rental car—it’s sleek and black, so shiny it makes her eyes hurt.

Raven comes back just after sunset, to find Clarke waiting for her, curled up in the bay window, glass of wine in hand. It’s dandelion wine, made in the mountain, so sweet it’s almost bitter. There’s a bowl of water by her hip, which she stirs with her finger, though it’s long gone stale. She poured it hours ago, just after Tristan pulled out in his shiny black car, and searched the water’s reflection for any sign of Raven, any sign she was safe.

She saw her, in the high school gym, shooting balls through the hoop from the half-point line. Wells whooped from the bleachers, just like when they were in school. Clarke let the image blur into nothing—she didn’t want to eavesdrop. She just needed to know Tristan hadn’t gotten to her, first.

“What, you got started on the booze without me?” Raven crows, spying the open bottle on the floor. It’s nearly empty, by now. “Damn, Griffin. Who knew you were a lush?”

“Tell me about Tristan,” Clarke says, without preamble. There’s no point, and anyway there may not be much time. She watches as Raven’s grin sags, the skin of her face pales.

“Who told you?”

“He did. When he showed up at my house.”

Raven swears, limping over to her bag, half-unpacked and sitting on the couch. “We have to go,” she swears again as her bad leg knocks into the end table, scattering the flowery book ends Anya kept in her bathroom. “ _Now_!”

“I’m not running,” Clarke says, firm, and Raven stares at her.

“What are you gonna do—hit him with your bat?”

Clarke tips her head up, haughty. They used to call her _princess_ in school, when she did this. When she stared them all down, unflinching. After everything she’d done, it seemed silly to be afraid of teenagers. “If I have to.”

Raven scoffs. “You’re crazy.” But her hands still inside her bag, and she sinks down in the chair with a huff. “But I guess I am, too. When do you think he’ll be back?”

Clarke shrugs, scowling down at the scrying bowl. She’d tried to find him in the water, but it only works if she has a personal connection to someone—and she doesn’t even know Tristan’s last name. “Probably the morning. Dawn, most likely.”

Raven nods, resolute. “Then we should get some sleep, right? I’ll set an alarm.”

“Raven,” Clarke hesitates, but just a little. If it could help, she wants to at least try. “Can we call the police, or will you be in trouble too?”

Raven sighs, rolling her shoulder like it’s sore. “I wasn’t just counting cards in Reno,” she admits. “I was—I met a guy.”

Clarke blinks. “A guy?”

“His name was Finn,” she grins a little, sounding fond. “He was a—a grifter.”

“What, like a pickpocket?”

Raven snorts. “No, definitely not. More like, Clyde Barrow.”

“And you were his Bonnie?” Clarke guesses.

“Not at first. I thought he just wanted to count cards, which—you know I’m good at that. And honestly, casinos are so rigged that they kind of deserve it. But then, I realized he was using me as a distraction. For the heists.”

“The _what_?”

“He stole a lot of money from a lot of people, Clarke,” Raven says, voice gone quiet. “And they all think I know where he hid it.”

“Do you?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here right now,” Raven snaps, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I just—I swear I didn’t know, okay? Not until last week, and as soon as I found out, I left.”

“Okay,” Clarke nods. “I believe you.” And she does; Raven has no real reason to lie, not about this, not when she knows Clarke would accept her no matter what. “So, we get rid of Tristan and then what? How many people know where you are?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. I didn’t even know _he_ knew where I was. I wouldn’t have come here, if I did.”

“Okay,” Clarke decides, standing up to pull out the mattress, tossing the paisley cushions off to the side without much thought. “We’ll go to sleep, and wake up before dawn, so we’re ready. I’ll try to talk to him, first. Convince him you don’t know anything.”

“Yeah,” Raven agrees, but she gets up and marches to the kitchen, before coming back with a knife. “Just in case talking doesn’t work.”

“Good idea.” Clarke fetches some anise seed from the cupboard, wrapping it up in a square of white handkerchief, and slides the bundle under Raven’s pillow. “It’s for protection,” she explains.

“You need one too.”

Clarke grins a little wryly. “I always sleep with one. Get some rest.” She leaves Raven still clutching the knife to her chest.

She dreams about the man in the night sky, with skin made of stars. His eyes blink down at her with crescent moons for irises, and Clarke stares back. He doesn’t speak; he gives her no message. Just watches, and smiles a little. She feels an ache of familiarity when she sees him, a fondness that comes from deep in her bones. She _knows_ him, somehow, without needing any introduction.

She used to dream about a boy filled with stars, when she was younger. Just a child, no older than eight. He would come and spend time in her dream world with her, teaching her to skip rocks that glowed in the dark and didn’t obey gravity the way they would in real life. He told her stories about ancient kings and princesses, and a woman with hair made of snakes. His voice never sounded quite right, though—he spoke with windchimes in his mouth.

Clarke hadn’t even thought about the dream boy in years, not until now.

“You used to tell me stories,” she says, shouting inside her own head. The man opens his mouth, the shining outline of his lips gaping wide in a circle, and meteors fall out, crashing to the ground like a million Roman candles. “What happened to your voice?”

A comet streaks across his tongue, and turns everything white. The man disappears, and Clarke is left alone with the brightness.

When Clarke wakes, it’s to the sound of something slithering inside her house, the wind like a hissing in her ear, saying _wake up wake up wake up_ , so she listens.

The truth is, she’d known Tristan wouldn’t wait until dawn. His kind always comes in the dark, so they can hide in the shadows like the serpents they are.

The truth is, she knows, because she’s one of them.

Clarke pads quickly and quietly from the bathroom, where she’d curled up in the tub, in case he thought to check her bed first. She has the bat, though she won’t need it; she’d made the lotion just after he’d left—apple seeds, foxglove, terrabane and mistletoe. The same kind she was wearing when Dante Wallace was pulled out of thin air. The lotion feels like a dozen needles on her skin—not painful, but nearly there. Close enough to warn others away. The cream turns her into a Ring-Necked, with a golden band across their scales telling the world _I am dangerous. Do not test me._

Clarke steps carefully down the hallway; she memorized these floorboards as a child, she knows which ones speak and which stay quiet. She can feel the anticipation bubbling under her skin, like a kettle threatening to boil over. She can hear footfalls in the living room, and she quickens her pace.

Tristan is standing over Raven, still asleep, knife limp and forgotten in one hand. He reaches a hand towards the bared skin of her neck, just as Clarke reaches her own towards his shoulder.

His head is shaved, which is convenient; it gives her more of a target. Anywhere she touches, the venom will work its way into his system through his skin, and he’ll be seizing within moments.

Talking never works out very well, but she should probably still try.

“She doesn’t know anything,” she says, low enough that it doesn’t wake Raven.

Clarke curls her hand around the top of his neck, where it folds into the base of his skull, and holds it there. Tristan stills under her touch, and she feels a shudder move down his spine, before he turns to stare back at her.

There is no pain in his face, no telltale grimace, not curse or shout. There is no smell of burning flesh, or sizzle as the poison eats away at him.

Instead, there is this; Clarke’s hand on his neck, his eyes on her, his mouth twitching up _just barely_.

She realizes it a second before he hits her; he’s Oreia, too.

Clarke goes down quickly; she’s never been very physically strong, and Tristan is so much bigger, so much heavier. He has weight to throw around.

The sound of her knees hitting the hardwood wakes Raven, but that hardly matters when just one touch from Tristan could burn off her skin--or worse. Clarke reaches for the bat, where it rolled a few feet from her fall, and smacks it into his shins as he turns back towards the sofa-bed.

Tristan lets out a grunt, muffled enough that she knows he didn’t mean to, as the only bit of evidence that he can even feel pain. She swings back to hit him again, but he brings the heel of his expensive Italian boot down on her stomach. Her body curls in on itself, in reflex.

She can feel him raising his foot again, and struggles to breathe. Her ribs are, if not broken, at least bruised, and they ache with each move she makes. She’s still struggling upright, when he collapses down on all fours, Raven’s kitchen knife sticking out of his back. She’s jammed it just between his shoulder blades, but the blade itself isn’t long enough to do much besides shock him with the initial pain.

He’s already starting to rise again by the time Clarke stands. “She doesn’t know where the money is,” she says, a little desperate.

She has enough graves on her conscience; she doesn’t need another one. He doesn’t need to die.

Tristan laughs, spitting out a puddle of saliva, tinged pink, almost like he can hear her thoughts. And maybe he can; Oreia has never been a well-documented race. There are still thousands of things she’ll never know.

“That doesn’t matter,” he says, smile grim. He’s up on just one knee, now. “I wasn’t sent here for her _knowledge_.” He starts to lift himself up, and Raven’s going for the cellphone she has plugged into the wall. Tristan leans in until his breath hits Clarke with his words—he smells like mint, and moss, and dead things. “I was sent here for her _head_.”

There’s a _crack_ —head-splitting, like fireworks, or the foundation of a house—and then Tristan hits the floor, one half of his cleanly shaved head oozing a sludge that resembles maple syrup.

Raven stares at it from where she’s standing, across the room, phone unused, still in her hand. Her eyes flick up to Clarke, like she’s assessing the damage. Like she somehow thinks _Clarke_ might be hurt.

She isn’t, not really. Her ribs still ache, and the lotion is starting to feel more like a mild sunburn, but she’s alive, and breathing, and fine.

“Help me get him to the woods.”

They bury him out by the other bones. The marigolds are long-gone by now, with wild primroses grown in their stead. She isn’t sure what will bloom from Tristan’s corpse, and she doesn’t very much care.

They pack the last of the dirt down by sunrise, knees and heels of their palms covered in mud and grass stains, hair tangled and matted with sweat. Clarke washes her hands in water so hot it turns her skin red—scrubs them until the burning’s gone, until she can touch Raven’s arm without hurting her.

“So,” Raven says, voice hoarse—from what, Clarke isn’t sure. There was no screaming, no crying. It’s possible it’s worn out just from fear. She keeps glancing out the window, at the patch of newly churned earth, just inside the treeline. “What do we do, now?”

Clarke follows her gaze, blinking out at the sunrise for a moment, wiping the sweat from her skin. She’ll have to get rid of the baseball bat, and clean the floor with apple-vinegar. She’ll have to get rid of Tristan’s car.

“Now, we eat breakfast.”

 

The man arrives with a storm.

It’s been three days since Tristan’s burial, and Clarke and Raven are still forcing themselves not to jump when the door opens. They’ve told Wells, because they had to, because the secret of it was burning them up, and because he’s always deserved the truth.

“Hurricane warning,” he tells them, sliding into the booth beside Raven. They’re at Cece’s Diner, which is the only restaurant in town unless they count the Subway.

Clarke glances out the window, to see the sky bleeding violet, even though it’s barely two in the afternoon. “It’s a little late in the season, isn’t it? When was the last time we even had a hurricane hit the mountain?”

“August, 1992,” Wells rattles off, not missing a beat, and Raven shoves him in the shoulder.

“Show off,” she teases. He grins.

Clarke keeps her eyes on the clouds, gathering together in the sky, leaking into one another to form different ones. If she watches for long enough, it almost looks like dancing. “How long is the warning for?”

“At least seventy-two hours,” Wells says, as Fox shows up with their drinks.

The rain comes all at once, like a bucket being upturned on the building, splashing against all sides and lapping at the window pane, desperate to reach them. There is no thunder or lightning, but there is wind, enough to drown out the Top-140 cycling through the speakers, and rattle all the glass.

The man comes with the rain, crashing in through the front door, sopping wet and dripping all over the checkerboard linoleum, dark hair sticking to his skin.

Skin dark and slick with water, pinpricked by a hundred freckles blinking out at Clarke like stars.

He speaks and he sounds nothing like the boy from her dreams. There are no windchimes or meteors in his words, but. He speaks, and she _knows_ him.

She doesn’t notice the uniform until later—the shiny gold badge on his hip, beneath the black government-issued windbreaker. He pulls a black-and-white photo from his pocket, what looks like a mugshot, too far away for her to clearly make out.

The room isn’t half full, but they’ve all gone silent. Strangers don’t exactly mean great news, around here; and it’s more than clear he’s not a tourist.

“Can I have your attention, please,” he says, unnecessarily, since he already has it. “My name is Bellamy Blake, I’m a U.S. Marshal, and I’m looking for this man.” He flashes the photo around the room, coming to a stop at their table.

Clarke hears Raven hiss in a breath, feels Wells tense up beside her. Tristan stares out at them impassively through black and white film.

Clarke glances up to the Marshal, to find him staring at her. She watches a muscle tick in his jaw, like he’s swallowing words, and she wonders what he dreams about.

“Have you seen this man?” His eyes are harder than they are in her dream world. Harder and darker, a mild sort of threat; _Do not lie_ , they warn her.

She does anyway.


	2. Ash And Dust On My Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There have been a remarkable amount of three’s, lately, and Clarke’s trying not to let it bother her. It’s hard to not read into something, when reading into things is literally her job.
> 
> Three cryptic dreams she can’t decipher; three in the morning wake-up call by Raven; Tristan was her third customer; three days after his death, a U.S. Marshal arrives at three in the afternoon; three days of storm, after.
> 
> Those are a lot of lines to not read between.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops, smut. kind of.

After that first day at the diner, Clarke doesn’t see the U.S. Marshal again—though she _hears_ about him constantly. It’s been three days of nonstop rain, with the wind not letting up either, and Bellamy Blake has been combing through the town systematically, questioning everyone about everything, except her.

She tries not to take it personally; after all, she should be happy about it. Clarke hates lying, and tries not to whenever she can help it. She doesn’t believe in most of the specifics of Karma, but she tries not to provoke the universe. It tends to bite.

There have been a remarkable amount of _three’s_ , lately, and Clarke’s trying not to let it bother her. It’s hard to not read into something, when reading into things is literally her job.

 _Three_ cryptic dreams she can’t decipher; _three_ in the morning wake-up call by Raven; Tristan was her _third_ customer; _three_ days after his death, a U.S. Marshal arrives at _three_ in the afternoon; _three_ days of storm, after.

Those are a lot of lines to not read between.

Anya was the one who taught her the importance of numbers. Anya taught Clarke most things about being Oreia. How to read, how to look at the world and see _through_ everything, to find what’s written underneath. The universe sends its messages in invisible ink—she just has to shine the right light, to see it.

 _Except_ we _are the light_ , Anya told her. She was young, so young she shouldn’t be able to remember, but her mind works differently than other people’s. Oreia store their memories like the rings of a tree; they’re never lost, just buried under new ones.

On the fourth morning after the Marshal’s arrival, Clarke wakes at dawn. The cicadas are out in full force already, clearly irritated at having been forced into hiding for so long by the rain. The sky is a dusty blue, but mostly clear, and the air smells dryer than it has all week. The hurricane has passed.

She’s outside in her garden, checking on the grapevine tomatoes she’d planted just last spring, when the Marshal finds her.

“Miss Griffin?”

Clarke jumps, shrugging the cardigan tighter, suddenly irritated—with him, for getting the drop on her, and with herself for being caught unawares. She frowns over at him—he’s in his paper-bag-brown uniform, which only looks mildly wrinkled, and his golden badge flicks sunlight at her, from where it’s perched on his hip. His hair looks entirely too long and disheveled to be considered professional. Surely there’s a mandatory _length_ _rule_ or something, and he’s breaking it.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Clarke hums, not bothering to argue. She’s starting to feel remarkably undressed, in her pajama shorts and cardigan, hair a total mess on the top of her head. She doesn’t have any clients until nine-thirty, and had been expecting a nice lazy morning that she could spend with her plants and some ginger tea.

“I was hoping to ask you some more questions about Tristan Wilder,” the Marshal says, but it doesn’t sound like a choice.

“I get the feeling I have to answer,” she says, and he smiles, just a little, like he doesn’t really mean to.

“They did say you were psychic,” he muses, and if he weren’t about to interrogate her about the man she killed and then buried in the forest, she’d almost think he was teasing her.

Almost.

“Who said?”

He blinks at her. “Everyone. You’re a pretty big deal around here.”

Clarke scuffs the toe of her sandal against the earth, digging up a pebble. “It’s a small town. They don’t have much, in the way of entertainment.”

“Is that what you do?” She watches that muscle tick in his jaw, like he’s holding himself back, and she desperately wishes he wouldn’t. She still can’t shake the _familiarity_ of him, as ridiculous as it is. She barely even remembers his name. “Entertain people?”

It would be easy, she knows, to play this off, to nod and go along with it, say she doesn’t have the gift at all, say she just tells people what they want to hear, say she’s just _intuitive_ , good at reading body language. He’d probably get irritated with her, for conning her neighbors out of their money, but he’d believe her. It’s so much easier to believe the worst in people.

“Want to test me?” she offers instead, because something about him makes her want to show off a little. She wants him to believe in what she does, to believe her. She wants him to trust her.

Clarke tells herself it’s because she has two dead bodies buried in her backyard, but to be honest, she’s not actually thinking of them at all.

The Marshal grins, a little crooked. It reminds her of the boy from her dreams, the boy made of stars. Back when he’d tell her all the best stories.

“Alright,” he agrees. “But only because it might factor into the case.”

Clarke makes a show of rolling her eyes, even as the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. She nods towards the cottage. “Come on, then. I might as well make tea. Or do you drink coffee?”

“Tea is fine,” he shrugs, and follows her inside.

There are still dirty plates and chipped mugs filled with the last dregs of wine from last night’s dinner, but Bellamy doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he’s just being polite; it’s hard to tell. He’s quiet, but she can feel his eyes raking over the kitchen, taking the room in.

“Any preference?” she asks, and the question seems to take him off guard, so she clarifies. “For your tea.”

“Black or gray,” he shrugs, thumbing through the newspaper left out on the table, crossword only half-done. Clarke finds an old box of Irish Breakfast in the cupboard, and puts the kettle on the stove.

“Any preference for the reading?”

The Marshal looks over at her, mouth quirked up. “It’s your job. I’ll trust your judgement.” But even as he says it, she sees him eyeing the tarot deck off to the side. She tries not to grin too smugly.

“Cards it is.”

She slides the deck over for him to shuffle it. The cards themselves are fairly young; she made them in high school, spending her study hall drawing out the suits and filling them in with watercolor. The Marshal stares at them now, almost reverent. The seriousness of it all makes her nervous.

“These are beautiful,” he says, soft, glancing up at her. “Did you make them?” Clarke stares at him in surprise—and a little suspicion. He clears his throat. “My mom, she was a clairvoyant. She said tarot cards are important to a psychic. That usually they make their own.”

The sound of the kettle’s whistle shocks Clarke out of her seat, and she bustles around the kitchen, filling their mugs before settling back down at the table.

“What kind of reader was your mother?”

Bellamy gives half a shrug as he shuffles the deck expertly. “She did palms sometimes, tea leaves. She had a crystal ball.”

“No tarot?” Clarke motions for him to cut the deck, and he separates it into halves, shaking his head.

“Cards weren’t her thing.”

Clarke slides the cards out like a fan, slipping over each other, still face-down. “This is a beginner’s reading, so pick three cards.” He does, laying them each in a row. Clarke reaches for the first one. “This card will represent your past,” she says, and flips it over, revealing The Hanged Man.

“That seems ominous,” the Marshal says dryly.

“Evidently, so does your past.” Clarke tries to remember everything about the card—it’s been a long time since she’s done cartomancy, but it’s essentially like riding a bike; muscle memory kicks in. “It’s reversed, so this card represents selfishness, following the crowd, and manipulation. I’m guessing you had some power-hungry phase, when you were younger, maybe a teenager. You were the king of the school and ran the hallways with an iron fist. But since this is your past, it also represents self-sacrifice and wisdom in your present. You’ve learned from your mistakes, and you want to do better, even if you get hurt along the way. You think you deserve punishment for your past mistakes.”

She glances up to find the Marshal staring at her with an intensity that puts her on edge. When he realizes she’s finished, he clears his throat, dipping his head towards the center card. “Go on.”

Clarke flips the second card over, showing The Moon. “This card is your present,” she frowns, and feels the Marshal go tense, across the table.

“What is it? What’s it mean?”

“It symbolizes danger,” she admits on a sigh. “And hidden enemies, a mystery that’s hard to solve. The occult.” They share a rueful smile at that, and she feels it again—that pang of _I know you I know you I know you_ beating itself against her ribs. “But there’s another side to it, too. Moonlight represents a new understanding, or beginning. A fresh start.”

The Marshal nods, and Clarke moves towards the last card. The King of Swords.

“This is your future—military prowess and some sort of leadership role. You’ll be tested, to see if you’ll misuse your power. A lot will be at stake, and a lot of pressure on your shoulders. Generally, this card represents some sort of oncoming tyranny.”

“That’s not going to happen,” he says, firmer than he’s been since that first day, at the diner. “Like you said, I’ve learned from my mistakes. That won’t happen again.” He looks impossibly earnest, but Clarke’s seen that before. She collects the cards, starting to shuffle them for the next use.

“The nature of mistakes is repetition,” she sighs, but the Marshal shakes his head.

“Not this time,” he swears, and she nearly believes him. He clearly believes himself, which might be worth something.

Clarke could so easily open this man up and peel back his layers, to read what’s hidden underneath. Her fingers twitch at the thought, but it’s gone just as quickly as it struck her. She won’t, she never would. People pay her to explain their insides to them; she doesn’t need to go around, sticking her nose into locked hearts, when there are so many willing ones left to explore like open houses.

And, if she’s being honest, she’s a little bit worried about what she might see. The Marshal, she’s beginning to think, might not be so easily read.

“Well?” she asks, once the cards are set aside. “Did I pass?”

He frowns. “I’m not sure. You didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

Clarke makes a face, growing irritated. She’d forgotten about her tea, and now it’s gone cold. “That’s how it works. I explain you to yourself.”

“That sounds a lot like a cop out,” the Marshal says, arms crossed and mild. Clarke glares at him.

“Fine,” she eyes him a little, letting her eyes slide over him in a way she hadn’t before. Finally, she holds out a hand. “Give me your arm.”

“What, palm reading now?” But he lets her take hold of him, anyway.

“Nope,” she says, popping the _p_ so his eyes narrow. She’s always wanted to try this, but she’s never known anyone with so many freckles. The Marshal is _covered_ in them, on his face and forearms, where she’s pushed up his uniform sleeves. And, she’d bet, all over the rest of him, too. “Maculomancy.”

“Maculo- _what_?”

“The study of divination through freckles,” Clarke explains, studying the small pinpricks of melatonin cast across the skin of his arm like a net. Finally, her eyes land on a formation she recognizes. It’s essentially tea leaves, with some astronomy thrown in. She rubs her finger over the little patch of dots. “Gemini. You have a sibling, just one, probably younger. Definitely a girl. You’re very close to her.” She takes his other arm, searching for another constellation among the skin-brown stars. “Ursa Major—definitely the big brother, and you’re proud of it, and very protective, possibly _over_ protective. You forget sometimes, that she’s a bear too, and can take care of herself.”

The Marshal makes a strange noise in his throat that she ignores, grazing her fingers up his inner arm, landing on a grouping by the crease of his elbow. “Taurus. You’re stubborn, way too stubborn, and it gets you into trouble. But you’re sensible where it counts, standing your ground but taking the most stable routes. Lupus means you think you’re a lone wolf and work better on your own, but you don’t. You actually thrive when you’re on a team, when you can lead others. You crave family and friends.” She looks up to find his eyes on her, dark and dangerous, the color of his tea, wet enough for her to drown in.

At their first meeting, Clarke had assumed Bellamy Blake was nothing but fire, but now that she’s this close, it’s clear that he’s made up of sea.

She taps at the spindly pack of freckles on his cheek. “Perseus. You want to be the hero. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

The Marshal wets his lips, and Clarke is suddenly very aware of how close— _inappropriately close_ —they are. She sits back in her chair without a word.

“Well,” he says, grinning a little, wry. “That was very educational.”

Clarke sets her mouth in a firm line, because she doesn’t trust it not to smile. “I try.”

The Marshal starts rolling his sleeves down again, cloth now wrinkled beyond repair. “Miss Griffin—”

He’s interrupted by a knock at the door, and Clarke looks over to see her neighbor Mrs. Cuyler, with her face up against the glass, peering in. She’s her nine-thirty appointment, and Clarke frowns down at her watch in surprise.

“Marshal,” she starts, but he shakes his head a little, like it’s reflex.

“Officer Blake.”

“Officer Blake, I’m sorry but I have a customer. Can you interrogate me some other time?”

He looks amused. “I can _question_ you some other time,” he corrects, standing and stretching in a way that makes his spine pop. Clarke grimaces at the sound.

He follows her to the door, presumably to leave, but when Clarke swings it open, Mrs. Cuyler blocks the doorway, looking delighted in her wide-brimmed gardening hat and floral muck boots.

“Ah, Mr. U. S. Marshall,” she smiles, and Officer Blake offers a polite nod back, ever the professional. “I see you’ve met our lovely Clarke!”

She seems altogether too excited by this development, and Clarke’s starting to understand why. Mrs. Cuyler eyes her outfit—obvious bedhead and pajamas—and gives her a knowing grin.

“Officer Blake just came by for a reading,” she explains, but it’s clear that Mrs. Cuyler doesn’t buy it.

“Of course,” she agrees, pleasantly. “For a _reading_.” She winks, and Clarke feels her skin turning twelve shades of beet-juice.

“And to question her about Mr. Wilder’s disappearance,” Officer Blake says, serious, probably to try to sober the situation, but if anything it just makes Mrs. Cuyler more excited.

The thing about small towns is, they don’t get many visitors, let alone scandals like missing people and possibly even _murder_. Everyone is very enamored with the drama of it all—there’s been talk of alerting Lifetime, to try to get a movie filmed, or at least an episode of Criminal Minds.

“I really should be getting,” Officer Blake says, and Clarke nods stiffly, completely unsubtle.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” she offers, as they step out the door. “Mrs. Cuyler, just make yourself at home.”

“Don’t hurry back,” Mrs. Cuyler says slyly, and it’d be cute, how she’s clearly trying to wingman Clarke, if she in fact needed or wanted the wingmaning. But as it is, it’s just mortifying.

“I’m sorry,” Blake offers, but Clarke just shakes her head.

“I should have kept track of the time, or at least gotten _dressed_.”

“I did sort of bombard you first thing in the morning,” he says, apologetic, and she waves him off. “What kind of reading does Mrs. Cuyler want?”

“Botanomancy,” Clarke waves a hand towards a pile of small and medium sized twigs, stripped from the surrounding loblolly and black spruce trees. “Divination through the smoke of burning leaves and branches.”

When she looks over, she catches him staring again, this time in something that slightly resembles awe. “How do you know so many different methods? I thought psychics specialized in just one or two kinds.”

Clarke shrugs. The sun is higher, which means it’s warm enough to lose the cardigan, but she’s only wearing a thin tank top underneath with no bra, and she’s not _that_ familiar with him yet.

“Divination is like a science,” she explains, or tries to. She’s had this conversation once before, with Lexa, who disagreed so vehemently that she left the tri-state area the next morning, in search of Oreia who might share her ideals. She still calls from time to time, and sends Clarke perfunctory emails to let her know she hasn’t been killed and eaten by some cult of serial killing truckers. “It can be studied and learned, just like any other science, and applied the same way. It’s just—a little bit different, and harder to understand. Not everything is explained the way it is in the school Biology books. But, it’s still science. We just haven’t caught up to it, yet.”

He’s watching her again, or studying her, and she sees a flash of what might be actual _fondness_ , before his face shutters back into a blank slate of professionalism.

“Thank you for the reading,” he says, stepping into his car, a mud-stained Jeep Patriot with wooden paneling on the sides. “I’ll be in touch, for the questioning.” Then he’s gone.

Mrs. Cuyler is sipping newly made tea when Clarke walks into the kitchen, and she grins at her over the rim of her cup.

Clarke sighs. “Seriously, Mrs. Cuyler— _nothing happened_. He was just here for a reading.”

“Whatever you say,” Mrs. Cuyler hums, which means she doesn’t believe her for a second.

“I’m going to go get dressed,” Clarke decides. Mrs. Cuyler was friends with her mother, before Abby retired and left Mt. Weather for good. They used to have lunch together, when Clarke was a child. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone, about the Marshal.”

“Of course, dear,” Mrs. Cuyler agrees, waving her off and then reaching for the paper. “Go put on some clothes. I haven’t read the Periodicals yet, today.”

The whole town knows about it by sundown.

“I think it’s a good opportunity,” Raven declares, dipping another fry in the plastic tub of ranch dressing. They’re at the diner again, because neither of them felt like cooking. Wells offered to make them dinner instead, but neither of them were in the mood for anything healthy either, so burgers at Cece’s it was.

Raven thinks the whole thing is hilarious. “You can seduce him with your psychic feminine wiles, and find out where he is on the case. Total James Bond stuff.”

Clarke glowers over at her, angrily sucking at the last of her milkshake, which does nothing except give her a brain freeze. “I am not _seducing_ the U.S. Marshal.”

Raven shrugs. “Your loss; he’s hot.”

Clarke looks at Wells for support, but he just shrugs. Wells is famously bad at choosing sides in an argument. He just wants everyone to get along. “It would help, if we knew where he was at in the investigation. He seems to like you so maybe you could—not _seduce_ him, but be friends.”

“I thought you were supposed to be _my_ best friend,” she accuses. Wells shrugs again, at a loss; he _really_ hates confrontation.

“He seems like a good guy,” he hedges, and at her blank look, he adds “He’s swung by the house a few times, to borrow some books. Mostly mythology, but a few occult stuff too, I think because of you.” Raven nods along, beside him.

Clarke stares between her friends for a beat, unbelieving. “Are you serious? I’ve only spoken to the man _twice_.”

Raven glances at something over Clarke’s shoulder, and grins, slow and wicked. The sort of grin she used to get before she dared them all to climb up the telephone pole by the main street bridge. The sort of grin that meant Clarke was probably about to fall sixteen feet and land in a patch of poison oak. “You seem to have made an impression.”

Clarke looks behind her, to find Officer Blake sitting at the countertop, ordering his meal. He glances over and catches her eye, raising a brow in question. Clarke makes a face back, and turns around.

“ _You_ are out of your mind,” she hisses, and Raven pokes her in the cheek with a fry.

“Face it, Griffin,” Raven’s eyes narrow, growing serious. “It’s a good idea. We need to know what he knows—or do I have to remind you that the man he’s looking for is buried in our backyard?”

Clarke kicks her under the table. “Shut _up_ , of course I know that! I just—it’d be smarter, to just lay low and avoid him. That way, we seem less suspicious.”

Raven heaves a sigh too big for her body, slouching down in her seat, leaning at least half her weight on Wells, who just takes it good naturedly. “If you say so,” she says, but she only half-means it.

And if, as they’re leaving, she feels Officer Blake’s eyes on her back, well. She just has to ignore it; he’s intrigued, because she’s a psychic. All newcomers are. He’ll get over it eventually, she just has to wait it out.

Clarke is in the shower when it happens. She knows what a vision feels like—the prickling that climbs up her skin, like phantom spiders. She feels the tell-tale wind ghosting through her hair, even as she stands under the water. She doesn’t have visions often, not since she was a little girl; she’s not that kind of clairvoyant.

But that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s happening to her now. Clarke closes her eyes as the feeling washes over her, shampoo dripping down her back.

Soon enough, the soap is replaced by hands, warm and heavy on her hips, which is new. Clarke steps out of the spray, pressed up against the tile, so cold it makes her chest goose bump. She wants to turn and look, but the nature of visions is fickle; if she opens her eyes now, it might just dissolve.

Before she can make up her mind, she feels warm breath on her shoulder. “You started without me,” he hums, the sound of it vibrating down her spine. He presses her against the wall more firmly, fingers gripping her skin so hard they might bruise.

Okay, so it’s a sex vision. She’ll go with it. It’s been a while since she’s had anyone besides her own hands, so her subconscious might be feeling a little desperate.

Except—this isn’t a dream, or something to interpret. This is a vision, which means in some version of the future, it’s real.

She feels lips graze against the slope of her neck, wet and wanting. “ _Clarke_ ,” he whispers, and Clarke finds herself whimpering at the sound. The flash of teeth against her jaw as he grins. “Spread your legs for me.”

She does. It’s not every day she has supernatural shower sex; she might as well enjoy it.

He moves a hand from her hip, letting it drift lazily between her thighs, while the other smooths up her stomach to play with her breast. She sighs, leaning back into him, and he laughs against her shoulder.

“ _God_ , you’re so fucking perfect,” he grumbles, and she hums appreciatively. She really hopes she meets this man soon—his hands are fucking insane.

“Talk to me, Clarke,” he says, breathing a little uneven as he grinds his dick against the swell of her ass. Part of her is a little bewildered by the fact that he can speak at _all_ right now; she’s still stuck on single syllable moans.

“You feel so— _ah_ —so good,” she forces out the words, letting her head drop against the tile when he speeds up the pace of his fingers. He curves a hand up around her jaw, turning her face so he can kiss her messily, groaning against her mouth each time she whines.

“You always feel so good,” he says, tipping his head against hers, hair dripping down both their faces and into her mouth as she gasps. He curls two fingers up inside her, and she presses her face against his shoulder, to muffle the sound. He pulls back to brush the wet tangled hair back from her forehead, and leans in to nose against her cheek.

He’s _nuzzling_ her, and she can feel his teeth as he smiles. “Want me to wash your back?”

Clarke’s still feeling hazy from her orgasm, and incredibly fond of the man who just gave it to her, vision or not. She squints her eyes open slowly, blinking the water away so she can see. 

U. S. Marshal Bellamy Blake grins back at her, hair dripping down his face as he looks at her, thumb still brushing softly against the nape of her neck. “Hey,” he says, quiet, leaning in to kiss her, impossibly chaste and _loving_. It leaves her light-headed—although that might be the heat of the shower, steam clouding the air so she can hardly see.

“Officer Blake,” she stutters, and he laughs, ducking his head against her neck, before reaching for a shampoo bottle on the caddie.

 _His_ shampoo bottle, one of those spicy cinnamon-scented boy shampoos. He keeps his shampoo in her _shower_.

“And here I assumed we were on a first name basis by now,” he teases, scrubbing his head under the spray and rinsing, before he grabs her lavender bottle and massages the soap into her scalp, combing out the tangles.

“Well, you know what they say about assuming,” she says, still feeling a little stunned, even as his hands on her scalp are nearly putting her to sleep.

He hums, switching places with her, so she can stand under the spray to rinse out the shampoo. The spider legs start up along her arms again, which means the vision is coming to an end.

She should be thankful for that—she needs time to process this, time to process the fact that _U. S. Marshal Bellamy Blake just fingered her in the shower_ , and apparently does so often enough that he keeps his own soaps here—but all she can feel is a low sense of disappointment, when his smile starts to fade.

Clarke reaches out to run a hand along the wet skin of his stomach and he catches her wrist, holding it there. She sighs, tipping her head back further under the water.

When she opens her eyes, she’s alone, and the water’s beginning to run cold. Clarke turns off the faucet and steps out of the stall, shivering.

She checks her hips for bruises, for any sign that he’d been there, but her skin is still pale and clear.

 

Raven stumbles in the next morning, to find Clarke rolling dough out on the floured countertop, fingers dusted with white. She’s wearing her dad’s old Guinness apron over her pajamas, hair thrown up in a nest on her head, with curls leaking out that she keeps having to brush back with her knuckles, every few minutes.

Raven eyes her suspiciously from the doorway, which seems fair; Clarke’s never awake this early without reason—in this instance, that reason is Bellamy Blake. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, or if she did she can’t remember it. She’s still jittery from the feel of his hands on her, and the sound of his voice in her ear.

“Who jumpstarted your engine,” Raven asks, voice hoarse and grumbly from sleep. She makes a beeline for the coffee, already made and still steaming in the mug. She sniffs it a little skeptically.

Aleuromancy was Anya’s favorite; fortune cookies filled with apples and nutmeg and little scraps of paper detailing the insides of one’s heart. Clarke doesn’t bake them too often, just twice a month, but whenever she does, Cece lets her sell them at the diner for one dollar a pop.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Clarke shrugs, which isn’t _technically_ a lie. She’s definitely not telling Raven about her vision—she’d be insufferable about it. “Want to help me write the fortunes?”

She probably shouldn’t let her; the last time she did, Raven just put in a lot of quadratic formulas, and the galactic address of planet Earth, as stated by Douglas Addams.

Raven shrugs, sitting down at the table, where the little squares of paper are waiting to be filled. “Why not?”

Clarke does proofread them all before putting them into the balls of dough, just in case, but Raven behaves herself. There is one that says _you’ll get head next week_ , but it is technically still a fortune, so Clarke lets it be, and slides the cookie trays into the oven. Anya’s only took about ten minutes to bake and always came out looking perfect, but Clarke’s take about twenty-five minutes, and usually look a little lopsided because she always uses too much butter.

“Any readings today?” Raven asks around a mouthful of the extra dough, fingers sticky from butter and dusted with white.

Clarke shakes her head. “I’m taking the day off.” Raven raises a brow, but doesn’t argue. Clarke can’t remember the last time she went a full day with no appointments. She tends to prefer keeping busy, with work or in her garden. Plants have never come naturally to her, not like they did to Anya, or Jake, and Clarke has to work at her green thumb constantly.

She’s not sure what might happen, if she decided to slow down and stand still for just a moment, and she doesn’t really want to find out.

Raven helps her pack the cookies into the truck, and then climbs into the bench seat beside her. They haven’t spoken about how long she’s planning to stay with Clarke, but it’s been silently decided that she can’t leave yet, not until Mt. Weather forgets the name Tristan Wilder.

“I’m thinking about getting my old job back,” Raven offers, as Clarke ambles slowly down the mountain, towards the center of town. Her truck is a good, dependable vehicle, but it’s still ancient, and she doesn’t feel like pushing her luck.

“At the garage?” Clarke frowns. Raven had worked at the garage throughout high school, for some quick extra cash. Her manager liked her well enough, and it wasn’t a bad job, but.

Raven went to _M.I.T._ It feels like such a waste, that she should end up back in some dead end job, in overalls covered in engine grease stains.

“No, my other old job,” Raven snaps, and then winces. “Sorry, I just—I know it’s shitty, okay? But if I’m going to stay here, I need to work.”

“I get it,” Clarke promises, flailing a hand for Raven’s, without glancing away from the road. Raven folds their fingers together and squeezes. “Whatever you decide to do, I’m with you, you know that right?”

“Yeah,” Raven says, and Clarke chances a glance to find her staring out the side window, face caught in an expression she can’t read. “I know.”

They’ve been selling cookies at the diner for an hour—well, _Clarke’s_ been selling cookies for an hour, while Raven sits beside her and single-handedly drinks all of Cece’s free coffee refills, like caffeine’s going out of stock—when Officer Blake steps inside.

He makes a beeline for the counter, like usual, because he apparently has something against the booths. Clarke isn’t sure what; maybe a booth killed his parents, or his childhood dog, or something.

It doesn’t take him long to notice her, and when he does she expects him to make his way over to question her, either about Tristan or her work—but instead he immediately turns red and swings his head back around, taking a gulp of coffee.

It’s an— _interesting_ reaction, and doesn’t go unnoticed by Raven, who shoots Clarke a _look_ that she promptly ignores.

“What the fuck was that?” Raven says, brushing some cookie crumbs from her chin mildly. Clarke opens her mouth to deny everything, but she’s cut off by the shrill ring of the bell as the diner’s door slams open.

A girl stands in the doorway, eyes blazing and fierce though she can’t be more than seventeen. She’s wearing some sort of prep school uniform, with the plaid skirts and blazers, and has a Jansport book bag slung over her back.

Everyone stares, but she has eyes only for the Marshal, who’s beginning to stand, looking shocked.

“Octavia?” he asks with a frown. The rest of the guests are clearly doing their best to eavesdrop, although there’s really no point. Neither of them seem to notice; it’s like they’re alone in the room.

“When were you going to tell me?” the girl—Octavia, apparently—demands. “You said you were running paperwork up in Virginia!”

“I was,” Officer Blake says, crossing his arms a little defensively. “And now I’m here, on a case. Why aren’t you in school?”

“You promised you wouldn’t take on any more field work,” Octavia says, furious, and the Marshal sighs, turning back to Cece, signaling for her to walk over.

“One hot chocolate please,” he sighs, and Octavia marches across the room to take a seat on the stool beside him, dropping her bag to the floor without care.

Cece is clearly waiting to be introduced, because out of all the gossips in Mt. Weather—and there are a _lot_ of gossips in Mt. Weather—she’s the biggest one. Clarke suspects it’s most of the reason she started the diner in the first place; no one knows more about a town than the one who makes their food.

“Octavia, this is Cece,” Blake obliges, looking altogether uncomfortable. Octavia just seems bored—and irritated—but mostly bored. “Cece, this is my sister Octavia.”

Raven leans into Clarke, voice a low whisper. “And the plot thickens,” she pulls back with a grin.

Clarke glances over to the Blake’s, watching as Bellamy yanks the sugar away from his sister, when she tries to pour all of it into her drink. He catches Clarke’s eye, and blinks away.

“Yeah,” she agrees, throat dry for no reason. Someone’s ordering a cookie, but she can’t even hear their voice.


	3. I Step Outside My Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “L’appel du vide,” he says, mouth moving against the skin of her palm. The motion of it makes her shiver, but he reaches up and grips her wrist, holding her hand in place. “The call of the void. You think leaving Mount Weather would be suicide?”
> 
> “Maybe.” She makes a face, because that’s not quite right. “I don’t know who Clarke Griffin would be, outside of Mount Weather.”
> 
> Bellamy’s hand goes slack on her wrist, fingers cool from the night air. “Clarke, do you know anything about the disappearance of Tristan Wilder?”
> 
> Clarke lets her hand fall back to her side with a shudder, watches Bellamy’s jaw tick from the loss. “No,” she whispers, nearly drowned out by the lazy melody of her windchimes, just above their heads. “Goodnight, Bellamy.”
> 
> “Goodnight,” he says, but it’s lost to the metal and wind.

Bellamy Blake is avoiding her.

To be quite honest, Clarke was avoiding him too, at first. But then she started to notice that whenever she walked into the diner, he’d be on his way out, head ducked so they wouldn’t make eye contact, dragging his sister along by her sleeve.

Octavia Blake, at seventeen, is in her last year of high school—apparently she’d run away from her prep school in the Northeast, paid for by her brother’s government salary, and was refusing to go back without him. So for now she’s taking the last of her semester online and spending a lot of time going back and forth between the library and Wells’ collection of books.

Octavia is also a lot more talkative than her brother, which is the only reason why Clarke knows anything about her at all. She likes to sit perched on a bar stool at the diner, pretending to study while really she spoons out the mini marshmallows Cece keeps around for special occasions out of her hot chocolate, chattering on about her life in New England and how _warm_ the autumn is here, and how nice the forest smells.

“The air smells different in the city,” she explains. “Like, I don’t know, chemicals. Fake stuff. But out here, everything smells _real_ , which is way better.” The whole diner swells with pride.

“You should get that brother of yours to let you out more often,” Cece says, adding a few more puffy marshmallows into Octavia’s mug. “Show you the wonders of fly fishing.”

“Fly fishing?” Octavia makes a face, nose scrunching up. “Is that the one where you fling the string around?”

Cece looks positively scandalized, and Clarke has to bite back a grin, hiding it in her green tea. Cece stocks it especially from Clarke, and she doesn’t have the heart to say that there’s a difference between _loose-leaf herbal_ , and the box of Sleepytime Cece gets from the IGA.

Clarke’s still waiting for Wells and Raven to meet her for dinner, when Officer Blake steps inside. His eyes find her immediately, like there’s a magnet under her skin he’s honed in on. He blinks once, twice at her, and then turns to frown at his sister at the bar. She’s pretending not to notice.

“You’re supposed to be studying,” he says, and Clarke does her best to not eavesdrop, she really does, but the diner is fairly small and his voice carries.

Octavia flips the open textbook at him, from where it sits forgotten off to the side. Her brother does not look convinced.

“It was time for a chocolate break,” she says primly, taking a huge sip from her mug.

“According to you, _every_ time’s time for a chocolate break,” Blake rolls his eyes, and slides her bag off the stool beside her, so he can take its place. “One waffle,” he adds to Cece, “With sausage on the side.”

“It’s nine o'clock at night, Bell,” Octavia frowns. “Why do you always order waffles? You should try the burgers. They’re really good here.”

“I _like_ the waffles,” Blake grumbles, and Clarke has to bite back her grin. Whenever they’re together, the siblings seem to forget they have an audience, and bicker back and forth good naturedly. Clarke’s never much cared that she’s an only child, has never had the sort of sibling envy she knows others do, but watching the Blake’s now, she can understand it.

“Let me go over your algebra notes before you turn them in,” Blake says, and Octavia makes a face around the spoon in her mouth. She casts her eyes around the room, searching for an escape, or maybe for something to distract her brother.

She lands on Clarke, and lights up like a winning slots machine.

“Clarke,” she calls, and Clarke shares a startled look with Officer Blake, when he whirls around on his stool.

“Clarke Griffin, right?” Octavia presses, and before Clarke can make a beeline for the bathroom, the girl’s already crossed the floor to stand at her booth. “You’re the town psychic.”

“Yes,” Clarke agrees, doing her best not to fiddle with her straw wrapper. She has the habit of tearing it into little pieces when she’s nervous.

“Can you do a reading for me right now?” Octavia asks, but Blake pulls her back by her elbow.

“O, stop it. Miss Griffin’s a professional.” He tosses a grimace at Clarke, neck red a blotchy, like he’s still too embarrassed to meet her eyes. “Sorry about her, she gets a little— _enthusiastic_.” Octavia just shakes her arm free with a scoff.

“I can pay,” she offers, slapping a crumpled twenty on the table, close to Clarke’s sweating glass of water, so the paper edges start to soak through. Blake glares at her.

“That was for lunch _only_.”

Octavia shrugs and turns back to Clarke. “So? Will you read for me?”

Clarke glances between the siblings, eyes Blake as he crosses his arms, looking anxious and out of place. His uniform is as wrinkled as usual, and there are flecks of mud near the hems of his pant legs, though not on his boots. She can still hear Raven’s voice echoing around in her head— _we need to know what he knows_ —and Clarke isn’t sure when she might get to speak with him again, short of cornering him in the darkened parking lot, like a drug dealer or something.

“You don’t have to,” he blurts out. “I’m sure you don’t even have your cards.”

“No, I don’t,” Clarke agrees, and watches the relief flicker across his face, bouncing from freckle to freckle. She turns back to Octavia. “But if you go over and order a glass of water from Cece, and bring it here, I can read that for you.”

Octavia beams, bright and pretty, and rushes back to the bar within seconds. Officer Blake just frowns down at her, for once holding her gaze when Clarke stares back at him, in challenge.

“You can read a _water glass_?” he asks, not sounding skeptical so much as very confused.

Clarke reaches forward to swipe a finger down the wet side of her own glass, and licks off the condensation. She glances back up to find Blake’s eyes on her mouth, and she smiles, a little bit smug. She’s never been one to show off her abilities, but—Officer Blake seems to be bringing out a lot of things, in her.

“Anything can be a message, Officer Blake. You just need to know how to recognize the different language, and how to decipher the words.”

“So you’re not a psychic, you’re a linguist.” The corners of his mouth turn up, like a cat, amused in spite of himself.

“I can’t be both?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but his sister shoulders past him, glass of water in hand, and slides into the seat across from Clarke, eager. “Now what?”

“Take a sip, as big or small as you want,” Clarke instructs, and Octavia takes a healthy gulp before sliding the glass over for Clarke to take. “Now we wait for it to warm up, and start dripping. See those little bubbles in mine?” Octavia nods. “Those can be read, too.”

“What do they say?” Octavia leans forward to stare at them more closely, and Clarke has to press her smile to her shoulder when she sees the older Blake do the same.

“The usual; I’m good at seeing other people’s puzzle pieces, but not my own.”

“What about mine?” Octavia turns her attention back to her own glass, starting to form a puddle on the table, since the AC isn’t on. Clarke can’t swallow her grin this time; it’s nice, seeing someone so excited about what she does. The citizens of Mount Weather have been familiar with clairvoyants ever since Anya’s grandmother blew into their town as a teenager, and set up shop on this mountain. Divination is just as much a part of this town as the diner, as the cicadas and loblolly pines and gritty sand swept inland from the shore.

Clarke usually only does haldromancy with mirrors, and has only _actually_ tried it once or twice, but reading water tends to work roughly the same way, regardless of the form it takes—like a dozen different dialects of the same root language.

“You’re tenacious,” she says, and Officer Blake snorts. “Smart, but not very focused. You’re interested in everything, but nothing holds your attention for very long. There’s a boy,” Clarke shoots her a knowing smile, and Octavia flushes immediately. “But he’s up north—”

“What boy?” her brother demands, and the girls shoot him matching looks of annoyance. “Phoenix Academy’s an all-girl’s school!”

“Oh my _god_ Bell, he lives in the town, okay? We hang out on the weekends sometimes.”

“Octavia Marie,” Officer Blake growls, “We will _discuss_ this at h—at the hotel, when we get back.”

“It’s a bed and breakfast,” Octavia snaps, and Clarke wishes she could melt into the cracked vinyl of her seat. She’s never done well with playing witness to others fighting—it reminds her too much of her parents, of being a little girl with a pillow stuffed over her ears so she wouldn’t hear them shouting.

“Should I stop?” Clarke asks, interrupting, and Officer Blake shoots her a withering glance, apparently all past embarrassment forgotten.

“Yes,” he says, while Octavia snaps “ _No_ ” at the same time.

He turns his glare on his sister. “ _Yes_.”

“I paid for the reading,” Octavia argues, pointing at the twenty dollar bill, nearly soaked all the way through by now.

“Technically _I_ paid for it,” her brother grumbles, and Clarke’s had enough.

“I’d be more than happy to read your fortune too,” she tells him, and Octavia snorts.

“That won’t be happening,” he says. “We’re very sorry for interrupting your dinner,” he nods back towards their abandoned plates at the bar. “Come on, O.”

“Thanks, Clarke,” she chirps, sliding out of the booth, slower than is altogether necessary, probably just to piss her brother off. It works.

“Officer Blake,” Clarke calls, just before he walks off. “About Tri—Mr. Wilder. Have you had any luck, finding him?”

The look he gives her is unreadable, which is never a good sign. She’s already regretting her question, but she knows Raven would have given her an earful if she hadn’t at least _tried_.

“Not yet, no,” he admits, which is twice as much as Clarke was expecting. Mostly, she was expecting a lot of _why do you want to know_ ’s. “But we know for sure that he came through Mount Weather, so someone must have seen _something_. Nobody vanishes into thin air. We’ll find him.”

“Mm,” Clarke agrees, and he gives a shallow nod before leaving.

 _RAVEN HAIR AND RUBY LIPS—_ Clarke jumps as The Eagles blares from her purse. She offers an awkward laugh to the rest of the diner, all of them looking over at her by now, and curses under her breath. She _knew_ it was a bad idea to let Raven play Candy Crush on her phone while she was bored, earlier.

 _WOO HOO WITCHY WOMAN! SHE GOT THE MOON IN HER—_ “What the fuck, Raven?” Clarke snaps.

“Is that about the ringtone, or about us being late?” Raven asks, only a little out of breath, like she’s trying to hurry.

“Both,” Clarke grumbles. “But don’t bother coming to the diner. I just got some _insider info_ on the case. I’ll meet you at home.”

“First of all, babe, this isn’t _Ocean’s Eleven_ , and you’re not about to blow the whistle on some white collar crime. Second of all, can you at least bring some onion rings with you? Jaha and I lost track of time and we’re starving.”

“I think that might be a little dramatic.”

There’s a pause, and then the muffled sound of a stomach growling, because Raven is ridiculous. “Did you hear that, Griffin? That’s the sound of my body systematically eating itself because I am _dying_.”

“ _Fine_ I’ll get you your onion rings, you drama queen. Bye.” Clarke hangs up and crosses over to the cash register, where Officer Blake is paying for his own meal. He steps aside to fiddle with his wallet and change, and Clarke places her order to-go.

“Are you,” Blake clears his throat, and Clarke turns to him. He’s back to avoiding her eye, it seems—but at least he doesn’t seem suspicious. “You’re headed to your home?”

“Yeah, that’s typically where people go at night,” she says, flat, and he grins at the floor.

“Fair enough.”

Cece comes back with a bag for Clarke, and she walks with Blake to the door, letting him shoulder the door open for her. “Where’s your car?”

“I let Raven borrow it today,” she says, surprised. She thought for sure he’d run off the moment she looked at him again, honestly. This is the longest they’ve spoken since she gave him the reading at her kitchen table. “It’s just a twenty minute walk.”

“Alone?” he asks, sounding dubious, and Clarke has to laugh.

“You know I’ve been doing this for ten years, right? I know these woods pretty well.”

“It’s not the woods that I’m worried about.” He glances around, shifting from one foot to the other. He’s clearly uncomfortable with the thought of her walking home on her own, and it’d be sweet if it didn’t feel so overbearingly _brotherly_. Doesn’t he already have a sister to fawn over?

Clarke starts to inch her way towards the dirt path that she’s had memorized by heart since she was twelve years old. She knows this land like she knows the lines of her own skin, she feels the shallow pulse beneath her feet, like it’s the beat inside her veins. She knows the smell of this air, mountain ash and moss and soil; it clings to her like cigarette smoke, so she can never wash it out.

“I appreciate your concern, but it’s really not necessary,” she says, more as a goodbye than anything, but the Marshal just gives one last look towards the bed and breakfast down the street, and then falls into step beside her.

“Maybe I have some more questions for you,” he offers, gruff, and Clarke stares at him. The path isn’t well-lit; there are no street lamps this far from Main Street, so the most they have are the stars.

It feels eerily nostalgic, like a memory. Or maybe like a dream. Clarke tries not to think about it.

“But now you’ll be the one walking alone,” she points out, but he only shrugs. The stars turn his edges to silver, and make it hard to look at him, so she looks away.

The mountain smells like it always does. A little like trees, a little like rain, a little like death. The death could be anything—a fox drowned in a spring, a cottonmouth rotting in the mud, a whitetail bleeding out from a bullet hole. Or it could be simply waiting, having shown up just a bit early, and found itself with time to kill.

 Clarke clears her throat, hoping it might clear her thoughts too. “So?” she asks, and Blake jumps a little, like her sudden voice in the quiet startled him. Like maybe he forgot she was even there. “You said you had more questions?”

“Yes I did,” he agrees, but not really. They both know he doesn’t have any more questions—at least, not about the case. “How long have you lived in Mount Weather, Miss Griffin?”

“Clarke,” she corrects, automatically. “My whole life. But you know that; you did your research.”

“You could have left,” Blake continues, unconcerned. “Gone to college, traveled abroad, met somebody, settled down somewhere new. Why didn’t you?”

It’s not the first time Clarke’s been asked a variation of that question, but she’s just as tired of it as she was the last time, and the time before that. “Why did you leave your hometown, Officer Blake?”

“Bellamy,” he says, and when she glances over he’s already looking at her. He looks nearly blue in this light, nearly dreamlike, and when he catches her eye, he holds it, refuses to let her look away. “I think we passed first-name basis a long time ago, Clarke.”

She feels a shiver run down her spine, like spiders racing each other over the divots in her bones. It’s not unpleasant, and by the time it’s faded, she already wants it back. “I think so too.” She says it so quietly, barely even a whisper, but he nods like he heard her just fine. He probably did. She’s not sure how strong this thing between them is.

“My mom used to say dreams are the answers to real life’s riddles,” Bellamy says. It sounds like the sort of thing Anya might have said, and Clarke wishes she could have met his mother. “Have you been having any particularly _eye-opening_ dreams lately, Clarke?”

She thinks of the ocean, thick like blood and rushing over her head until she couldn’t breathe. She thinks of Anya, paring the skin of her finger like an apple. She thinks of Bellamy, opening his mouth so meteors could fall out. She thinks of that night in the shower, of his teeth on her jaw and his hands on her skin…

“I get the feeling you know exactly what kind of dreams I’ve been having, Bellamy.”

It’s too dark to tell, but she’s positive that he’s blushing. She wants to taste the heat of it under her tongue.

It crashes into her so suddenly she staggers a little, the _want_. He reaches out to help steady her, hand in a heavy grip around her upper arm, and that only makes it all worse. She wants to touch every inch of him, breathe him in and out, map him with her fingers until she knows him as well as she knows the mountain. She wants to read the skin in between each freckle, like braille.

“I—” he swallows, and when she meets his eyes, they’re dark, impossibly dark, filled with an ache she probably mirrors. “We should get you home,” he finishes, stuttering on the last few words, like he’s catching his breath.

Clarke knows the feeling. “Yeah,” she agrees, and he lets go of her arm as she steps forward. She watches him clench and unclench his fingers, like he’s trying to stretch the feeling back into them. “My friends will be worried.”

“Right,” he says weakly. “Exactly.”

 They walk in silence for the rest of the trip, which is just as well—Clarke knows she should be pressing him for information about Tristan, about the case, but it takes all her effort just to keep one foot in front of the other. The warmth of him just beside her, close enough to reach for and touch, is almost too much.

The _want_ isn’t like what she’s ever felt before—or rather, it’s like _everything_ she’s ever felt before. It’s every type of wanting she’s ever known, all tied up in one, beneath the brown skin of a man she hardly even knows. It’s every high test score she’s ever wanted, every toy she’s ever asked for, every letter to Santa, every bedtime prayer, every quick kiss behind the bleachers, every dance in every barroom, every ache for her grandmother and her father and everyone else she’s ever lost.

She’s close to thinking she may actually _die_ from the weight of it all, when they round the bend that leads up the drive to her house, and she hears Bellamy let out a breath of relief beside her. They can see the string of fairy lights on her front porch, and two silhouettes through her kitchen window, and they quicken their pace, just a little.

He’s just as eager to be done with the walk as she is, and Clarke tries not to wonder what that might mean.

“Any last questions?” she asks, trying for a joke that falls flat right in front of her. But Bellamy’s face is earnest, when she turns around.

“Have you ever wanted to leave Mount Weather?”

Clarke reaches up without really meaning to, and traces the lines of constellation on his cheek. _Perseus_. Hero. _He wants to rescue you_ , she warns herself, and then she thinks, _I know_.

“Sometimes. The same way that sometimes I want to jump off Hickory Street Bridge, just to see what might happen. The same way that sometimes I want to see if biting off my thumb really would be just as easy as biting into a carrot. The same way that sometimes I want to drive into a bus.”

“ _L’appel du vide_ ,” he says, mouth moving against the skin of her palm. The motion of it makes her shiver, but he reaches up and grips her wrist, holding her hand in place. “The call of the void. You think leaving Mount Weather would be suicide?”

“Maybe.” She makes a face, because that’s not quite right. “I don’t know who Clarke Griffin would be, outside of Mount Weather.”

Bellamy’s hand goes slack on her wrist, fingers cool from the night air. “Clarke, do you know anything about the disappearance of Tristan Wilder?”

Clarke lets her hand fall back to her side with a shudder, watches Bellamy’s jaw tick from the loss. “No,” she whispers, nearly drowned out by the lazy melody of her windchimes, just above their heads. “Goodnight, Bellamy.”

“Goodnight,” he says, but it’s lost to the metal and wind.

Clarke shuts the door behind her, leaning her head back against the wood so she can try to calm her heart rate before stepping any further inside her house.

“Hey, was that Officer Hot Ass?” Raven calls, rounding the corner, and Clarke opens her eyes with a grimace.

“Yes, that was US Marshal Bellamy Blake,” she confirms, and Raven rolls her eyes dramatically.

“Did you at least give him a goodnight kiss, for walking you home?”

Clarke thrusts the bag of cold onion rings at Raven’s chest without a word, continuing on through the kitchen and towards her bathroom. “I didn’t ask him to walk me,” she defends, and hears the rustle of paper as Raven fishes for her snack.

“Okay so what’s this trade secret you got your panties in a bunch over?”

“Raven, I’m tired,” Clarke sighs, and she _knows_ it’s not Raven’s fault that she’s feeling overwhelmed and drained and irritable all at the same time, but she still _is_ , and she needs to lie down and try to forget that this night ever happened.

Or maybe she needs to try to imprint every second of it into her memory, she hasn’t decided yet.

“I’ll explain in the morning, alright?”

“Fine, but I’m expecting lots of kinky details, for my trouble.”

“ _Raven_.”

“Did he at least let you use his handcuffs?”

“ _Goodnight_ , Raven.” Clarke shuts and locks her door, pointedly. She hears a soft, wet _thud_ against the wood, like Raven just threw an onion ring at it.

Clarke doesn’t bother with a shower, too tired to do really anything but strip off her sneakers and jeans, and flop down on top of the covers. She closes her eyes with a sigh, and when she opens them, he’s there, right beside her.

Her bed has turned to grass, but not like the rain-soggy grass outside; this dream grass feels like feathers, expensive goose down that she stretches out in, like a cat. Bellamy cracks a smile, golden as the sun, and follows suit. When he moves she realizes he’s naked, they both are, and she watches the tendon stand out on his neck, so vivid it makes her mouth water. He has freckles on his chest, too, on every inch of him she can see, and she wants to run her tongue over all of them.

She doesn’t realize she’s closed her eyes again until she feels him at her cheek, nosing at her, eyelashes soft and wet against her skin. He’s crying.

“Why does it feel like I know you?” he asks, and the sound of it breaks her heart.

Clarke reaches out for him, moves to touch the tip of her tongue to his cheek, licking at the salt and the wet until he shudders in her arms. “Because you do,” she tells him. “You do, you do, you know me, you’ve always known me.”

She thinks about the boy in her dreams, when she was still young enough to believe a dream was all they were, and she knows it’s true.

“Remember in the morning,” he whispers, and she isn’t sure why he thinks she won’t. She remembers everything. She always has.

His hand drifts down to stroke the skin of her knee, and that’s all it takes, she’s so wired. She feels like she’s been waiting ages to be touched by him, to be touched like this, all white light and rough fingers.

She’s never come this hard before, never come like this, isn’t even sure it could be described as _coming_ , because it feels like she never left.

“Remember,” he breathes into her mouth, leaving the taste of his tongue like a promise.

Clarke wakes in the middle of the morning. The dew has just begun to melt from the leaves, the birds are still bustling, and nothing about the world seems like it changed much.

She knows better by now.

She dips her fingers down between her thighs, and they come back sticky. Her hair is slicked with sweat, and her legs feel sore from an orgasm that never even happened. Or maybe it did—all the other lines seem to be blurring, lately, why shouldn’t this one as well.

Clarke rinses the last of the dream in her shower, until all she can remember is how good he looked in the summer grass.

 

“You want to tell me why we look like a couple of cat burglars, and I’ve got mosquitos the size of Alaska draining all the blood from my ass?” Raven hisses, and Clarke shushes her with a wave.

“Because you refused to use my bug repellant, and also you have a very nice ass.”

“Clarke,” Raven growls, “I can feel every ounce of iron systematically leaving my body.”

She does sort of have a point; the bugs are worse than usual today, and it’s late afternoon, which just makes everything more horrible. They’re both crouched down behind the hedges that line Niylah’s bed and breakfast, for three reasons.

“One, because Niylah’s my ex and you know she hates me now,” Clarke whispers. “Two, because Officer Blake is staying here and if he sees us, he’ll be suspicious. And three, because this is the only place Tristan could have stayed the night before he attacked us.”

“What, and we’re going to sneak in and look for evidence? Maybe kidnap a cat?”

Clarke makes a face. She _might_ have gotten a little carried away with the costuming. She’d just wanted them to be hard to notice, but in hindsight she should have known that all-black would have been too overheated. “No, any evidence or witnesses would have already been found by Blake.”

“So then _why are we here_?”

“Because there’s another witness he wouldn’t have considered,” Clarke says, grinning once she’s spotted it.

“Who?” Raven follows Clarke’s finger as she points up above them. “You’re joking.”

Clarke pulls out the Beeman R9 her dad bought for her eleventh birthday, back when she was obsessed with _True Grit_.

“Jesus fuck, where were you keeping that thing?” Raven demands, and Clarke shushes her again. “Is it real? When did you get a gun?”

“It’s a pellet gun,” Clarke rolls her eyes. “I’ve always had it. Now be quiet, I have to concentrate.”

She settles the gun in her arms, its weight familiar even after all these years, and puts the bird in her sights.

“Clarke, please tell me you’re not about to kill that bird.”

“I can’t,” Clarke says, and pulls the trigger. The pellet rips through the crow, at the soft part where its body meets its head. She watches it fall from the tree like an anchor.

“Oh my _god_ , Clarke! What did that bird ever do to you?” Raven stares at Clarke in outrage, even as she leans over to stretch out her bad leg, so she looks like a TV exercise instructor.

Clarke gives Raven her most unimpressed look. “You literally watched me kill a man in my living room.”

“Yeah, but he was an asshole. Who tried to kill us. That bird might have had a family, Clarke. Now what will they do?”

“Accept that their relative died for a good cause,” Clarke chirps, flicking the safety on before sticking the rifle back in her back. She reaches a hand out and helps tug Raven up, the metal hinges of her brace screeching terribly. “You sound like the tin man.”

“Yeah, I keep forgetting that the oil at Sinclair’s garage sucks. I was spoiled by the Midwest for too long,” Raven grimaces.

“How’s the new—old?—job, anyway?” Clarke hisses as she missteps, and a tangle of brambles slice at her ankle, as they pick their way through the trees to where the bird’s corpse lays.

“It’s, eh,” Raven makes a so-so gesture, with a shrug. “Sinclair’s still awesome, the work is still boring, Wick’s still an idiot. Nothing much has changed.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Clarke frowns, coming to a stop above the crow. It’s held up remarkably well, even with the small hole through its neck. It’s still in one piece, surprisingly, and she pulls out an old Food Lion plastic bag, flapping it open, to scoop the body into. She gives the bags a few twists for good measure, and turns back to Raven, who looks like she’s about to throw up. “Everything’s changed.”

Raven swallows the bad taste in her mouth and rolls her eyes. “ _O-kay_ , CSI Miami, let’s go—do whatever it is you’re planning to do with that dead bird.”

“Cut out its eyes and find out if it saw anything about Tristan,” Clarke tells her, and this time Raven really does throw up in the trees.

“I guess at least it’s not a raven,” she says, once she’s done heaving. Clarke just pats her shoulder and helps her move through the woods, back towards where she parked the car.

Clarke and Raven clear everything off her front porch first, because no matter how much apple-vinegar she uses afterwards, she really doesn’t want to bring a dead bird in her kitchen. They carry her wicker furniture into the garden, and then her extensive collection of ironic gnomes and plastic flamingoes, and then spread out some old newspaper, for good measure, before dumping out the dead crow.

Clarke finds two pairs of rubber gloves she didn’t know she had, hiding under the kitchen sink, and they do their best to not let it touch any of the rest of their bodies.

“I cannot believe you’re actually doing this,” Raven says, for probably the fifth time. Clarke’s lost count. “This is definitely the witchiest thing I’ve ever seen you do, and I’ve seen you water flowers that grew out of a dead guy’s bones, before.”

“I didn’t make the flowers grow,” Clarke argues, pressing the scalpel to the bird’s eye socket. From what she knows about eyes, which is admittedly not very much, since really she just did a quick google search before going out there, she has to scoop them out, like she would a bite of ice cream.

“That is literally the worst comparison you could have ever made,” Raven said, once she told her. “You just ruined _ice cream_ for me, Clarke. For _forever_.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Clarke says, letting her blade bite into the first bit of flesh. Some tar-like sludge leaks out around it, and Raven starts to gag. “It’s just a bird.”

“A bird that was _innocent_ and you _killed_ him,” Raven argues, and Clarke shakes her head.

“Again, did you somehow miss _the actual person who bled to death in my living room_?” The eye’s starting to shift, and Clarke holds her breath as she dips the scalpel underneath it, careful of the delicate membranes.

“Oh god, I can’t watch this—you’re on your own, Doctor Lector.”

“Did Hannibal even eat eyes?” Clarke muses, popping the first eye free. It’s roughly the size of a marble, and she turns to wave it at Raven, slowly so it doesn’t fall.

“ _Jesus_ keep that thing away from me,” Raven leaps back from the porch. “You know my _Tia_ was superstitious, Griffin. If that thing haunts you, I’m not calling the priest.”

“I don’t really think a priest would be interested in saving me anyway,” Clarke says, dry, turning the bird over so she can start in on the other one.

“Because you kill innocent birds and de-eye ball them,” Raven agrees somberly, and swears when Clarke nearly wipes some crow sludge on her shoe.

Oculomancy is one of the oldest divination arts, around back when human sacrifice was still common. But Clarke’s read enough of Anya’s books to know the basics, even if a crow’s eye is significantly different from a human’s.

For one thing, crows apparently have selective vision, which means they can see things with just one eye, and can see separate things with both.

“Apparently they can also memorize people’s faces, and the emotions they associate with them,” Raven reads off her phone. She’s delegated herself to listing off facts about crows, since she refuses to help with the actual divining.

“So if it did see Tristan, it’ll definitely be in here,” Clarke summarizes, studying the left eye, which she’s sliced into thin ribbons and spread out, so she could read it better.

“A group of crows is called a murder,” Raven continues. “Which seems oddly fitting for everything about this situation.”

“I get it, Raven. I murdered an innocent crow, whose children will probably now starve. I’m a monster.”

“I’m just saying, it also says that crows can hold grudges for forever, and can pass those grudges on to their offspring and friends. So if a murder of crows comes to murder you in the night, now you know why.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, and moves onto the right eye, starting to slice slowly and delicately from the top, so she doesn’t crush it.

“In Hinduism, they think that crows have their own language, and that by decoding that language, people will have endless information.” Raven looks up with her phone, pointedly. “So like, I’m not saying you killed an all-knowing, all-seeing, grudge-holding being or whatever, but I’m not _not_ saying that.”

“Raven, shut up,” Clarke breathes, leaning forward to get a better look at one of the center membrane ribbons.

“Oh my god, there is not fuzzy security cam footage of the dead hitman in those eyeball jigsaw pieces.”

Clarke shoots her her smuggest grin. “There definitely is,” she says, relief sending a rush of adrenaline through her body. Something’s _actually_ going right, for once. “And there’s even more inside the bird.”

Raven’s own smile evaporates as quickly as it formed. “Sorry, what was that?”

“You heard me,” Clarke tosses the eyeless corpse back in the grocery bag, along with her rubber gloves and bloodied scalpel, before twisting it shut. She’ll leave the newspaper and crow gore for now, to worry about later. “Come on, we’re going to Wells’.”

“What?” Raven rushes after her, taking the porch steps one at a time because of her brace, huffing over to the truck as Clarke starts the ignition. “Why are we going to Wells’?”

“Because I let him borrow my book on haruspication.”

“What the fuck is haruspication?”

“Divination through animal entrails,” Clarke explains, and Raven makes a face.

“Jaha will read anything, I guess. You’re seriously going to cut that thing up even more?”

“Raven,” Clarke says, serious, “I’m going to kill and cut open every single bird in Tree Crew County, until I find out who hired that hitman.”

“Damn, Griffin,” Raven says, ducking away to hide her pleased smile. But Clarke can see it in the rearview mirror. “You know I like it when you go all Buffy on me.”

Clarke finds Raven’s hand, and grips it. She’ll need her own hand back soon, to shift gears, but she lets Raven hold it for a moment. She needs her to know she’s not alone in this. They’re in it together, always have been.

And Wells is, too.

In hindsight, she probably should have noticed the beige-painted Jeep sitting outside the Jaha mansion, as Clarke parked, but she blames the adrenaline and the fact that she was possibly carrying the answer that they needed, in a bloody plastic bag wrapped so tightly around her wrist that it was starting to cut off the circulation.

So when Clarke rushes in through the entryway, past the library and sitting room, down the corridor and into the kitchen, she isn’t fully prepared to find Wells and both Blake siblings laughing over coffee and butter cookies, at the granite breakfast bar.

“Clarke,” Wells says, surprised albeit pleasantly, but Clarke only has eyes for Bellamy, who’s staring red-faced and wide-eyed back at her.

“What’s in the bag?” Octavia asks, breaking the spell, and Clarke blinks away, snapping back to attention.

“Dead bird,” Raven says, and Wells levels them both with a heavy look.

“Please tell me you did not just bring a dead bird into my kitchen.”

“Surprise?” Clarke tries, weakly.

Bellamy seems to have shifted back into business mode as well, even if his cheeks are every bit as pink as Clarke knows her own are. She can still feel the ghost of his tongue in her mouth. “ _Why_ do you have a dead bird in a Food Lion bag?”

“Clarke figured she could do her magic thing on its eyes, and find out if it saw your missing person.” Raven answers, again, and Clarke shoots her a withering glare. She may have a— _complication_ with Bellamy Blake, but he’s still investigating the disappearance of the man she killed, so she doesn’t want him to know _everything_.

Raven ignores her and pretends to pick her nails.

“Octavia,” Bellamy starts, but apparently his sister is used to this sort of thing, because she slides off her stool easily, rolling her eyes all the way.

“Go study, don’t eavesdrop, this is adult-slash-work stuff, I know, I know,” she chants, only stomping a little as she marches out of the room. Bellamy watches her go with fond exasperation.

He glances back at Clarke once she’s gone. “And? Did you find anything?”

Clarke worries her lip, just for a second, because—it’s not that she doesn’t _want_ him to know, she does, which is a problem in and of itself. But he _can’t_ know, not about the part she’s played in Tristan’s disappearance.

But on the other hand, it’s not like a crow seeing Tristan take a cigarette break outside his bed and breakfast, and then call someone on his cell phone, could somehow lead back to her, right? She’s just a paranormal citizen, doing her civic duty. Everyone else in Mount Weather is obsessed with the case, so why shouldn’t she?

“Yes,” she admits. “It saw him outside the bed and breakfast. He stayed there one night, from what I could tell. But I’ll be able to tell more, once I cut it open.” She turns to Wells, who’s still eyeing the bag like it’s his worst nightmare.

Which, to be honest, it probably is.

“Wells, do you still have that book I let you borrow? About divination in Ancient Rome?”

“Oh,” Bellamy says, and she turns to find him looking even redder than usual. He slides a palm over his face. “That was yours? I, uh—it’s in my car. I’ll go get it.”

Raven at least waits until he’s left the room to smirk, so she’s slowly growing more conscientious. That’s something.

“ _Outside_ ,” Wells tells her, firm and unyielding. “The deck.” He shoos them both out through the sliding glass doors, onto the cherry-stained wood looking over the expanse of lush carpeted grass and crystal-blue pond some meters away.

Clarke settles back on her knees and the heels of her feet as she unwinds the bag. Bellamy steps out onto the deck, book in hand, just as she tips the bird out.

“ _Holy shit_ ,” Raven breathes, and for once Clarke has to agree.

The crow struggles to its feet, wings flapping awkwardly for balance. It twists its broken neck this way and that, the angle made odd by the hole from her pellet. It’s trying to see, but it can’t, because its sockets are still hollow and bloody and raw.

“That can’t be normal,” Bellamy says, crouching down beside her, so their shoulders and thighs touch.

Clarke shakes her head and holds her breath as the crow tips back, and screams.


	4. There Is A Road, There Is A Way, There Is A Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the corner of her eyes, she sees him smile at the steering wheel, like he’s just remembered something funny. “When we were kids, you used to braid flower chains into my hair. The flowers were strange--kind of blue, some weird shape I’d never seen before. I tried to look them up later, but I could never figure them out.”
> 
> Clarke grins. “I remember that. You said you liked the color of my eyes. You wished yours were that color. I dreamed you those flowers, so you could wear the color around.”
> 
> “You called them bit-o-blue’s,” Bellamy finishes, and then swallows, like he’s trying to decide how to say something. “I woke up after one of those dreams, with the flowers knotted in my hair.”
> 
> Clarke whirls to look at him so fast she feels something in her neck crack, but she ignores the burning. Bellamy’s glancing back and forth, between her and the road. “How is that possible?”
> 
> He huffs out a sigh. “How is any of this possible?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is going to be longer than previously assumed, just fyi.
> 
> the language that the Oreia speak is meant to be a sort of mix between latin, gaelic and greek, mostly greek, but some of those letters are also from Tolkien's elvish. as always, thanks for bearing with me on how slowly this fic is coming along. i've been super sick recently, so this chapter has been especially slow-going.

Octavia wants to keep the crow.

She’s calling it _Corvus_ \--”After the constellation, not the species,” and Clarke vaguely remembers the young Bellamy from her dreams telling her the story of the crow and Apollo. She remembers feeling sorry for the bird, who had only wanted a break from its work--and no matter how much Bellamy tries to get her to see reason, she won’t budge.

It doesn’t help that Wells and Raven are on her side now, flashing Clarke equal looks of shock and disgust when she first goes to wring its neck a _second_ time, so she could finally open it up like she intended.

“Clarke, you cannot kill the miracle bird,” Wells said, like it was obvious, and so now they were left with a blind, undead crow, and none of the answers Clarke was hoping to pluck from inside it.

“Fine, but you have to feed the thing,” she hears Bellamy grumble from where he and Octavia are still arguing over her new pet, out on the deck. “And if it shits on any of my things, I’ll let Clarke cook it for dinner.”

He marches inside through the sliding doors, to find Clarke making tea over at the counter. She waves a spoon at him, and he sighs, crossing over. “She always wanted a pet growing up,” he admits, sliding onto one of the breakfast bar stools. He gives a shallow nod when Clarke offers him a cup. “She used to collect caterpillars in the backyard, back when our mom was still alive. She’d trap them all in a tupperware box, with a colander as the lid, because it already had holes that they could breathe through. She thought she was so clever because of that. But then one night it rained, and the box filled with water, and they all drowned. She cried and cried when she found them. She thought she’d killed them, herself.”

Clarke sets the tea--anise and chamomile, some of the special blend she’d made for Wells--in front of him, and then starts on her own.

“She always wanted a real animal, though. Dog, cat, hamster, it didn’t matter.” Bellamy takes a sip and winces, like he just burnt his tongue from the heat. “I never thought it’d end up being a zombie bird, though.”

Clarke snorts in spite of herself, and then dips her little finger into her drink. It’s a trick her mother taught her. She stirs it counter-clockwise, and then lifts the room temperature tea to her lips. Bellamy watches her drink, looking starstruck. She’d be lying if she said it didn’t make her heart stutter, seeing the open awe on his face, like a raw wound.

“Every time I think I can’t be surprised by you anymore, you prove me wrong,” he muses. “I’m starting to think there’s nothing you can’t do.”

“I can’t ride a bicycle,” Clarke says, and he grins. “Or draw with my right hand.” She frowns down into her mug. “I can’t seem to figure out the puzzle of Mr. Wilder.”

“You brought an animal back to life after shooting it and scooping its eyes out,” Bellamy says, flatly, and Clarke shakes her head. She still can’t figure out the crow’s puzzle, either. She’s seen reanimation before, but never like this, never so _automatic_. Like she’d just somehow hit a reset button inside the bird.

There are too many questions in her mountain these days, and not enough answers. It’s like they’re breeding and spreading out quicker than Clarke can even ask them.

“I told you, I’m a linguist,” she explains. “Reanimation isn’t really my style.” _But death is_ , a voice--really more like a breeze, than anything--whispers through her mind. Like she could ever possibly forget it.

“Okay, well, do you have like a phone book for psychics, so we can figure out whose style it is?”

Clarke scowls at him, grinning at his own joke, and she opens her mouth to make a snide comment, before she remembers that she actually already knows.

She gulps down the rest of her tea and stands, giving Bellamy a look of appraisal. For having seen a dead thing become suddenly undead, he’s taking it remarkably well. But, well, in a place like Mt. Weather, _supernatural_ is sort of the default.

“How much do you know about liminal spaces, Officer Blake?”

Bellamy groans, finishes his own drink, and starts sliding on his jacket. “Just assume that I know next to nothing about your line of work,” he tells her. “My mom may have had the shine, but she died when I was thirteen, and didn’t really tell me much, before that.”

“Liminal spaces are the in between, the _threshold_ between the natural, human, world and the supernatural, non-human world. Think of it like a curtain; in most places, where there’s a wall between our world and others, there are some areas where that wall becomes thinner, flimsier. A curtain that can be raised, so that we can pass back and forth.”

“And you know where one of these curtains is?” Bellamy asks. Clarke nods.

“There are hundreds--rest stops just off the highway, supermarkets during the graveyard shifts, certain empty warehouses, broken lighthouses, a children’s playground after sundown, ferry docks, forgotten bus stops, cemeteries, forest trails, fields lined by a chain-link fence, bowling alleys, flickering streetlights, churches that are never used, cheap motels that are always vacant. Any one of those could be a curtain.”

“So,” Bellamy drawls, clearly unsure. “We just have to find a rest stop or a bowling alley?”

“It’s not that simple,” Clarke says.

Bellamy grumbles “It never is,” and she ignores him.

“For a curtain to lift, there has to be someone there to lift it, someone who knows what they’re doing. Until then, there’s only the potential for the space to be liminal.”

“Okay, so we’re looking for someone who lifts the curtains,” Bellamy tries, and Clarke nods, taking his hand without thinking. It feels rougher than it does in her dreams--dreams make everything smoother, like water sanding down a rock’s edges. But Bellamy’s skin against hers is warm and real and calloused. His fingers fold between hers like they were made to fit there. His hand nearly swallows hers whole.

“Yes,” she agrees, pulling him towards the front door. The others are still outside, fawning over the previously-dead-but-currently-alive bird, but Clarke doesn’t fetch them. The drive is less than four hours, leaving them more than enough time to get there and back before sundown.

She maybe shouldn’t be helping the man who’s trying to find out who killed the man that Clarke murdered--at least, not helping like _this_. Offering bits and pieces of information is one thing; leading him to someone who might have some seriously game-changing insights is another. She maybe shouldn’t be showing him this side of her existence at all.

But Clarke can’t help feeling like whatever chance she might have had, of avoiding Bellamy Blake, of forgetting him and moving on with her life as it was before, disappeared before she ever even met him. She lost that chance, the first night he was in her dreams.

Anya used to tell her it wasn’t that the world worked in mysterious ways, just that most people just didn’t know how to listen.

Clarke slides into the front seat of Bellamy’s Jeep--her truck gets worse gas mileage and anyway, she doesn’t feel like driving. She presses her ear to the cool glass of the window as he sets up his GPS, a portable kind that sticks to the windshield and droops tangled wires down the dashboard.

“You won’t need that,” Clarke says, as Bellamy grumbles, thumbs too thick on the virtual keyboard. “I know the way there.”

“This is Plan B,” he shrugs, finally turning the key in the engine. “I like having a backup.”

Clarke shrugs back as they start off down the gravel road. Wells had the option to have it paid by the county, some years ago, back when they’d received an influx of tax money from the government, for things like new stoplights and paving their previously unpaved roads.

But Wells and Clarke used to play in his drive as children, collecting the little chunks of gravel and renaming them gemstones and charging them in the moonlight, and tying them together with string. Clarke’s pretty sure he only kept it the same out of sentimentality. Wells is the most nostalgic person she’s ever known.

Clarke spends the first fifteen minutes directing Bellamy through all the sharp turns hidden by underbrush, forgotten by the makers of his GPS. But then they hit a stretch of windy mountain road that continues for seventy miles, and the silence between them swells.

Bellamy’s the first to break it.

“Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s a memory, or a dream.”

Clarke glances over at him. His fists are wrapped tight around the steering wheel, bracing for each drastic bend in the road, made jagged by the mountainside. His eyes are steady on the path ahead of them, uniform crinkled up beneath his seat belt. A few curls have drifted down, caught on his eyelashes, and Clarke bites back the urge to brush them away.

“Me too,” Clarke admits, looking back down at her hands.

From the corner of her eyes, she sees him smile at the steering wheel, like he’s just remembered something funny. “When we were kids, you used to braid flower chains into my hair. The flowers were strange--kind of blue, some weird shape I’d never seen before. I tried to look them up later, but I could never figure them out.”

Clarke grins. “I remember that. You said you liked the color of my eyes. You wished yours were that color. I dreamed you those flowers, so you could wear the color around.”

“You called them _bit-o-blue’s_ ,” Bellamy finishes, and then swallows, like he’s trying to decide how to say something. “I woke up after one of those dreams, with the flowers knotted in my hair.”

Clarke whirls to look at him so fast she feels something in her neck crack, but she ignores the burning. Bellamy’s glancing back and forth, between her and the road. “How is that possible?”

He huffs out a sigh. “How is any of this possible?”

He has a point and so Clarke doesn’t answer. She’s not sure she could, anyway. Until he walked into the diner just three weeks ago, she’d thought he was just a dream-thing made up in her mind, like Anya’s strange fruit, or the _bit-o-blue’s_.

“You told me stories,” she says, quiet. “About kings and stars and quests. I know a dozen different fairy tales, thanks to you.”

“Yeah, well I’m starting to think they weren’t all fiction,” he breathes, knuckles cracking as he shifts his grip on the wheel. Clarke watches as the mid-afternoon sun softens his face, catching the brown of his skin on fire. If she glances from the corner of her eye, he looks like pure light, like the flare of a camera, enough to make her eyes water.

Clarke blinks away, back to her window, growing wet from condensation left by the AC. Without really meaning to, she lifts a finger to the glass, tracing the symbol that she learned by heart when she was just five years old. It’s been passed down through her family, along with Anya’s thin gold necklace, along with the foxglove recipe Clarke keeps hidden in her bedside table drawer, along with the ashes of the oldest Witch Hazel tree in the Blue Ridge Mountains kept in a roughly carved box on her mantle. The symbol isn’t much of a family heirloom, less like a crest than a name all its own, in a language too long dead to remember.

“What’s that mean?” Bellamy asks, as Clarke traces over the pattern a second time, when it starts to cloud over with water again.

“It’s something my grandmother taught me,” she says, because there’s no real point in lying about it. “It’s sort of another name for my family, or a symbol for us. It used to mean ‘mountain daughters.’”

Bellamy eyes the pattern and Clarke in turn. This time she lets it cloud over completely. “What’s it mean now?”

Clarke shrugs, turning away. The road is coming to an end soon, and she’ll have to continue with directions. “Now it’s just a bunch of lines. Turn left up here.”

Bellamy does as he’s told, and Clarke leads him through the small southern towns, each more cracked-open and sprawling than the last. They pass hollowed-out tobacco barns and grown-over fields of winter wheat and hay bales that cast giant looming shadows like ancient creatures across the ground. They pass desolate 7/11’s and schools closed down for Spring Break and Baptist churches promising redemption and potluck dinners.

Eventually they trade the steep, winding mountain roads for the long flat stretches of plains, for the sand-swept coastal roads advertising fireworks stands and the South Of The Border theme park every few miles.

Finally Clarke directs him down a one-way road of crumbling asphalt, with little sprigs of purple and yellow weeds sprouting through the pavement. They’re roughly half an hour from the last town they past, and Clarke knows for a fact that the nearest town in the other direction is another thirty minutes out.

Bellamy drives gingerly along the path, passing shuttered houses that might have once been beautiful, but are now just shells. Like the hard skins left behind by a cicada after it moults. A dozen hollowed-out bodies made of wood and brick and wrap-around porches. The air smells like the salt off the Atlantic ocean, just forty minutes away.

Finally they reach the end of the street and are left facing what used to be a small hydro power plant. Clarke can just barely hear the sound of running water, if she listens hard enough.

“What happened here?” Bellamy asks as they step out of the Jeep. He glances around at the abandoned houses with a frown. “Where did everyone go?”

Clarke shrugs. She’s never seen the small town occupied; as far as she’s concerned, it’s always been this way, suspended in the exact same shade of decomposition. “They probably all just moved away over time, once the power plant shut down. There weren’t many here, to begin with.”

The plant itself is made of thick cement, stained white over time by oxidation, covered in kudzu and ivy vines equally, sprawling up and over the side and back walls. On the front, a sideways 8 is carved into the surface. Beneath it, the letters _θÍν Íτος δενεÍ τέλος._

Bellamy pauses and cranes his neck, to stare up at the words. “What is that? Greek?”

“Close,” Clarke says. “It’s a different dialect than the one they speak today. The closest translation is _thantos dan eina telos_. Death is not the end.”

“Cute,” Bellamy mutters grimly. “They should make their own line of welcome mats.” He follows Clarke up the wheelchair ramp.

The front door is a heavy weighted steel, propped open by a chunk of mottled cinder block. Clarke steps over it and into the shadowy entrance, footsteps echoing throughout the empty rooms.

Bellamy follows after her and she can _feel_ the anxiety and suspicion rolling off of him in waves, warm and trickling down her back like rain water, or sweat. She reaches back without thinking, and grazes her fingers against his, until he takes her hand in silence. She leads him down the emptied corridor, lined with candles of all shapes and sizes and varying scents, towards the gated back door. It’s been years since she’s visited this place, but an Oreia never forgets. Some things just take a little longer to remember.

“What’s with all the candles?” Bellamy asks when they make their third turn, to find twice as many little flickering lights along the floor.

Clarke shrugs. “The Syrtári likes candles.”

When they step from the darkened belly of the plant out into the sunlight, they’re forced to pause and squint their watering eyes, getting used to the light again. Finally, Clarke glances around, searching for the cement bridge she knows is suspended nearby, over the lake below. She can hear the rush of the water fall below them, even though she can’t see it from the angle where they stand.

The bridge’s entrance is guarded by thick blackberry brambles, the berries themselves bitter and small, the vines wild with wicked thorns. Bellamy swears as they tear at him through the thin mixed cotton of his uniform, but Clarke is used to their sting, and bites down a hiss. She doesn’t let go of his hand, and Bellamy doesn’t either; she’s pointedly not thinking about the feel of his skin against hers. This is the second time today that she’s held him. Twice makes it a pattern. Three times makes it something else.

The bridge is wider than she remembers, and her steps are sure as she makes her way across it. Bellamy, she can tell, is a little less sure, but he follows her anyway.

Once they reach the middle, she stops and crouches down, swinging her legs over the edge and planting her butt firmly on the heated cement. Bellamy follows suit beside her. From here they can see the waterfall in all its glory; it’s smaller than most of the others in this mountain, but the water falls in thick and fast waves, crashing down on the rocks below. This close, it should be deafening, but it isn’t. Clarke can feel the edges of reality bending around them. Just one breeze and the edge of the curtain begins to flutter.

Clarke doesn’t glance up when she feels someone else crossing over to her other side. She doesn’t turn and look as they sit down, knees bent up against their chest so that none of them hangs over. Clarke doesn’t even look over at them when she speaks.

“Hello Lexa,” she sighs, feeling more tired than she has in years. Playing catch-up with the past usually does that to her.

When Clarke finally does look over, she finds Lexa almost exactly as she left her. Beautiful, poised, and dark around the edges. There was a reason, why Lexa left the solace of their mountain for an abandoned bridge on the east coast. There was a reason, why Lexa specialized in undead things. Unliving things.

“Hello Clarke,” Lexa says, words as carefully measured as ever. If she’s surprised by Clarke’s arrival, or Bellamy’s existence, she isn’t showing it. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“You too,” Clarke agrees, and she’s surprised to find it isn’t a lie--at least, not totally. She did still care about Lexa, enough to be pleased to find she’s relatively fine and unchanged. But Lexa’s abandonment had stung for so long, and gone so untreated, that Clarke isn’t sure she’ll ever be able to say her name without it feeling like a papercut on her tongue.

Bellamy squeezes her hand, firm, a reminder. They aren’t here for her to walk down memory lane.

“Actually, we’re here on business,” she says, and Lexa raises a single brow, which seems fair. Clarke was still an at-home psychic, when Lexa knew her. She sits up a little straighter now, the fact that she’s here on official police business, that she’s helping solve a disappearance--even though she technically already knows all about the disappearance in question--filling her with pride.

Lexa had left because she’d wanted something _more,_ and she’d managed to find it in her graveyard of forgotten old houses. People come from all over, with their dead pets and dying relatives. Lexa had always had a way with death, a way of raising the curtain just that little bit, just enough for life to trickle back and forth beneath the hem, siphoning it through, to be washed away by the water.

She’d always tasted like it, when Clarke kissed her. Coppery blood and the sulfur of matchsticks and the sticky sweet tang of death that coated her skin like lip gloss.

“What kind of business?” Lexa asks, eyeing Bellamy up and down. He’s sizing her up as well, each on the other side of Clarke, who’s somehow managed to be caught in the middle of this strange stare-down.

“U.S. Government business,” Bellamy says, flashing his badge, and Lexa hums beneath her breath. Badges mean next to nothing to someone who lives on the tightrope between this reality and the next, so Clarke tries a different approach.

“Is it possible to reanimate something without meaning to?” she asks, and Lexa’s eyes narrow, intrigued.

“It is possible to do many things without meaning to,” she says, as frustratingly vague as Clarke remembers.

“There was a crow,” she explains. “I shot it, and cut out its eyes to read them. It was dead when I did that, but twenty minutes later, it was alive again.”

Lexa hums a second time, this time in thought. She’s never unhelpful _on purpose_. “Its eyes, did you find what you were looking for in them?”

It’s not really a _yes-or-no_ question, but Clarke answers anyway. “Yes.”

“Where did you perform the ritual?”

“It wasn’t really a ritual,” Clarke argues, and Lexa clicks her tongue.

“Everything is a ritual,” she says, firm. “You driving here and walking through those trees and sitting on this bridge is a ritual. A ritual is nothing more than an important series of events.”

Clarke sighs. Beside her, Bellamy wisely stays quiet. “On my front porch.”

“A sacrifice can be a strange thing,” Lexa says. “The bird gave its life and its eyes for you, and in return, it was given one of them back. Under the right circumstance, and in the right place, a sacrifice can become an exchange. And on an Oreia property, in a town like Mount Weather, for something as small as a bird, life and death can be easily transposed.”

“It’s never happened before,” Clarke frowns. She’d remember _that_.

Lexa shrugs. “There is a first time for everything.”

Finally, Bellamy speaks again. “What would happen if she killed the bird a second time?”

Lexa grows quiet for a moment. “To come back a second time, is unusual, but miraculous,” she says. “To come back a _third_ \--there are no promises for how much returns, or _what_ shows up.”

“You’re saying it might not be the crow’s spirit that comes back, again,” Clarke realizes.

“Why was it right, the second time?” Bellamy asks, and Lexa purses her lips.

“If it had taken any longer, it might not have been,” she says. “When something dies, there is a door left open inside of it, just for a small amount of time. If you work quickly enough, sometimes you can call the life back to it. But if you take too long, sometimes the door is already closed. Or sometimes, you call something else through, by accident. A spirit wandering by, that sees an open door and decides to take its chance, or hears your call and thinks you want them. Spirits can be easily lost, confused, or malicious. Death is a difficult terrain to hike.”

Clarke wants to ask about the dreams, about her connection with Bellamy and what that might mean. Lexa has done more research into their kind than anyone else she knows. She’ll probably have the answers, or at least know where they could be found.

But the idea of asking her ex-girlfriend about the boy in her childhood dreams, who’s now the man giving her subconscious the best orgasms of her entire life, makes Clarke want to set herself on fire.

“Would you both like tea?” Lexa offers, and Bellamy and Clarke nod in tandem.

She leads them back into the plant, down the candlelit halls towards what might have once been the staff’s kitchen, when the plant was still in business. There’s everything that’s necessary for a working kitchen--a sink, a stove top and oven, a refrigerator and dishwasher--although Clarke isn’t sure how many of the appliances actually turn on. The stove apparently does, since that’s what Lexa uses to boil the water. She seeps the loose tea leaves, spoons in what looks like wildflower honey, and then slides the mugs over towards them, at the end of the counter.

Bellamy nudges Clarke with his steaming cup and she bites back a smile, dipping her finger in and stirring until the drink is cooled. He brushes his shoulder against hers, a wordless thanks, and when Clarke glances up she finds Lexa watching them with interest.

“Marshal if you don’t mind me asking, what business do you have with a reanimated crow?” she wonders.

“Well apparently my sister’s adopting it,” he says dryly before coughing and reaching into his pocket, for the mugshot of Tristan that he carries around. “Actually, I’m investigating the disappearance of a man named Tristan Wilder. Miss Griffin is assisting.”

Clarke watches the recognition light up in Lexa’s eyes, and apparently so does Bellamy. “Do you know this man?”

Lexa nods and hands the photo back. “He was Oreia,” she says, giving Clarke an unreadable look. “He stopped by several months ago.”

“Why?” Clarke asks.

“He wanted a protection spell,” Lexa says, expression still blank. “He said his line of work was dangerous.”

“Did he say what that line of work was?” Bellamy asks, lit up from the thought of a new lead. Clarke could feel her insides start to sink, weighed down with nerves.

“No but he didn’t have to,” Lexa shrugs. “I could tell what he was, the moment I saw him.”  
Bellamy pushes on, impatient. “And what was that, exactly?”

“A contract killer,” she says, and Clarke’s lungs threaten to burst.

“I think I’ll get some air,” she blurts, completely obvious, but Bellamy doesn’t seem to notice. “Take in the ocean salt before we head back.”

“Yes, please do,” Lexa agrees, studying her. Lexa definitely noticed. “It’s good for the skin.”

Clarke just barely makes it out front before she starts to lose her breath, chest constricting more and more with every second. She’s panicking, she knows, and she knows she has no reason to; even if Bellamy knows now that Tristan was a hitman, he still has no reason to suspect that Tristan was after Raven, or that Clarke was the one that killed him, and buried his body in her backyard.

But that thought doesn’t make it any easier for her to get the air in her lungs, so Clarke sinks to her knees and digs her fingers into the dirt, hard-packed and dry. It’s not her dirt, her mountain dirt, rich and wet and filled with life. But it’s better than nothing.

The earth has always calmed her, when nothing else could. The smell of it, the feel of it all around her, the pulse of it now, thrumming against her fingertips. Clarke matches her inhales to the beat, matches her heart to it, and clears out her thoughts until there’s nothing but the blank tempo, a metronome beneath her feet.

Clarke breathes in the ocean air and lets the salt settle in her lungs. When she can finally breathe easy again, she stands and wipes her dirty fingernails against her jeans, before heading back in towards the kitchen.

Bellamy’s in the middle of his questioning, notepad out and ready. The sight of it makes Clarke smile--why wouldn’t he just use his phone? She thinks he might just like the aesthetic.

Now that she thinks about it, Bellamy and Lexa might actually get along, which would be a kind of feat since neither of them seem to really get along with anyone. But Lexa does most things just for the aesthetic, too. She used to wear bleached sparrow skulls around her neck. She used to paint her nails with blood from the water moccasins that died each time the woods flooded.

“Do you know who might have hired Wilder last?” Bellamy asks, as Clarke slides up beside him. He readjusts to make room for her, without even noticing. “Or who he might have been after?”

Lexa eyes Clarke before answering. Clarke keeps her face carefully blank. “No,” she decides. “I’m sorry.”

Bellamy sighs, clearly agitated with the way his case is going. Clarke bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood, to keep from offering up everything she knows. “That protection spell you made for him,” he starts, “How exactly does it work?”

Clarke turns to Lexa, holding her breath. Asking an Oreia to explain their gifts can be tricky. She’s not even sure Bellamy knows _what_ he’s asking her to do.

“It’s a resurrection spell,” Lexa says, finally. Clarke feels a shiver run through her insides, even as she stands perfectly still. It can’t be possible...no matter how good Lexa is at bringing back neighborhood pets run over by cars, she can’t possibly reanimate a full grown man, an _Oreia_. And Clarke would have noticed, if the grave in her backyard was opened up and empty.

“How does it work?” Bellamy asks.

“It’s an insurance policy,” Lexa explains. “You remember the door I told you about? Every door has a key, even the ones you can’t see. I simply gave him the ability to take out that key and hide it, and a spell to keep the door open for longer than most. If something were to happen that results in his death, he will wake up again in three days, and go searching for his key.”

“What happens if he doesn’t wake up?” Clarke blurts without really meaning to, and Lexa frowns at her. “If he were to die, and stay dead, what happens to the key?”

Lexa’s frown deepens. “The door would still be open,” she says. “Anyone, or anything, would be able to get through--and if someone else were to find the key, they could control him.”

Clarke has never felt so sick to her stomach. Not even the feel of grit under her finger nails can make her breathing even. She’s going to throw up.

But Lexa speaks before she can. “Marshal, I wonder if you could give Clarke and I a few moments to catch up?” she asks, without really _asking_. “We are old friends, and have not seen each other for several years.”

Bellamy glances over at Clarke first, a silent question, and when she nods he closes his notebook, slipping it back into the breast pocket of his uniform. “Of course,” he agrees, gruff and suddenly uncomfortable. “I’ll be outside,” he tells Clarke, and then leaves.

Lexa waits until the echoes from his footsteps fade out, before turning to Clarke, eyes accusatory and a little wary. “What have you done?”

“You know,” Clarke says. She’s still a little nauseous but mostly just _tired_. She’s so tired of the strange labyrinth that her life is becoming, with murder and undeath and strange dreams at every turn. “You knew the minute he showed you the picture.”

“Yes,” Lexa agrees, and for the moment she sounds just as exhausted as Clarke feels. “You opened a gate for something you do not understand.”

“Only because you sent it to my doorstep,” Clarke snaps, defensive. Lexa just stares until she starts to feel guilty; it wasn’t her fault, after all. Someone else gave Tristan Raven’s name, and Clarke’s address. Lexa was only doing her job--Clarke can’t fault her for that. “What if no one ever found the key or took control of him? Who would know how to do that, anyway?”

Lexa goes quiet for a moment, like she’s getting all of her words in order, preparing for her response, which means it must be confusing. Lexa tends to answer things in the vague sort of way that leaves you with more questions than you had to begin with. She’s been uncommonly helpful when it comes to Bellamy, and Clarke wants to ask about that too.

“What do you know about the _Lysaire_?” she asks, and Clarke blinks at her, confused.

“It’s just an old myth,” she says. “My grandmother used to talk about it.”

 _“We_ are just old myths,” Lexa points out. “Some stories aren’t _just_ stories. You should know that better than anyone.”

Clarke watches as Lexa collects the mugs, drained of tea save for the last few sips, filled with sediment and the bits of leaves that the strainer didn’t catch. She doesn’t bother stopping to read them, instead rinsing them in the sink right away. She never could stand messes.

“You know what it is, though?” Lexa asks, setting the mugs out to dry on the dish rack. “The _Lysaire_.”

“It’s a sort of--recipe book. A record of the Oreia families, and their talents,” Clarke says, thinking back to all of Anya’s old stories. “The only true record of us that exists--but it was lost in the fire of Alexandria.”

“ _Supposedly_ lost,” Lexa corrects. “There have been rumors--”

“There are _always_ rumors,” Clarke cuts her off, annoyed, and Lexa hisses.

“Not like these ones,” she says, darker than Clarke has ever heard her.

Lexa is scared.

“There’s an Oreia like no one has ever seen before,” Lexa continues, voice hushed even though no one can hear them. “She’s collecting others, recruiting them for her search. Any that refuses, goes missing soon after. She’s looking for the _Lysaire_.”

“What does any of that have to do with Tristan Wilder?” Clarke asks. “Or me?”

Lexa levels her with a heavy look. “The last time anyone saw the _Lysaire_ , it was being carried off by a pair of thieves, in Nevada,” she says, and Clarke’s heart sinks down to her stomach. “I heard Raven is back in Mount Weather. She’s always been rather reckless.”

“I know you never liked Raven,” Clarke starts, but Lexa interrupts her.

“I _like you_ ,” she says, earnest. “And believe it or not, I care about what happens to you, so let me give you a piece of advice.”

Clarke hesitates--the last time Lexa offered her a piece of advice, it was that they should both leave Mount Weather behind. That was the reason they couldn’t last together, in the end. They each would have had to give up too much--for Lexa, her freedom, and for Clarke, her home.

“Stay away from Raven, and Wells, and everyone else you care about,” Lexa says. “You’ll only end up getting them hurt, otherwise.”

Clarke isn’t sure what else she was really expecting--Lexa had always believed that Oreia should keep themselves apart from the human world. Not because they were _better_ , but because she worried that it would just end with someone’s death.

And right now Clarke has two dead bodies buried in her backyard, that say maybe she’s not wrong.

But she couldn’t leave four years ago, when Lexa showed up outside her home in the middle of the night, her grandfather’s Jaguar gassed up and ready, and Clarke still can’t leave now. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to walk away from the mountain. She’s not sure she’ll ever want to.

“Thanks,” she says, shorter than she intends to. She knows Lexa _means_ well, really. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

“You can be happy alone, Clarke.”

“Are you trying to convince me of that, or yourself?” Clarke asks. Lexa stays silent. “Thanks for the tea, but we should really get going.”

“The Marshal,” Lexa says, catching Clarke by the wrist. Her fingers have always been cold, but the shock of it is sudden, like ice down her shirt. “You care for him.”

Clarke pulls back, just a little, and Lexa’s hand falls away. “I hardly know him.”

Lexa’s mouth quirks up, barely, around the edges. Like Clarke has just told a joke. “I think we both know that isn’t true.”

Clarke chooses to ignore the message lying under those words. _You know him and he knows you. You care more than you should. You put him in danger, just like the others._ “Thanks for your help on the case,” she says, backing out through the doorway. “Take care of yourself, Lexa.”

She finds Bellamy waiting outside, just like he said he would be. He’s propped up against the side of the Jeep, thumbing at his phone, even though Clarke knows for a fact there isn’t any service this far out. When she gets closer, she sees he’s playing some sort of crossword app.

“Hey,” he says when he sees her, and she feels his eyes move over her, like he’s checking her for injuries, or something. “You good?”

Clarke nods, swallows, mouth already beginning to go dry. The sun is starting to set, bleeding orange over the sky like spilled paint. It’s going to be a long drive home. “Never been better,” she lies, and he gives a wry grin, sharing the joke.

Bellamy drives carefully through the night, alert and on the watch for deer, and black bears. He doesn’t turn on the radio, and Clarke doesn’t bother with it either, listening instead to the trill of the air conditioner, and the automated GPS voice as it offers directions here and there, mispronouncing street names with its robotic accent.

In the darkness, the mauled bits of blown out tires strewn across the highway become creatures lurking around the bends. The telephone wires become railroad tracks along the sky, the irrigation systems become arms and legs and spindly many-limbed things crawling their way towards the car. The world becomes a little less real, a little more dream-like, and before she knows it Clarke finds herself wrapping Bellamy’s hand up in her own, resting the weight of it in her lap.

Bellamy doesn’t say anything, doesn’t protest, just rubs a thumb over her knuckles and drives. Clarke thinks about bringing up--anything. The case, the crow, Lexa, the _Lysaire_ , their shared dream selves. But she can’t seem to open her mouth, and so the quiet sits over them like a blanket for the ride home.

It’s late when they arrive. Clarke nearly texts Raven anyway; her truck is still gone, which means Raven must have spent the night at Wells, and Clarke is itching to check on Tristan’s grave, just to make sure. But she knows her friend hasn’t been sleeping well, like her, and she can’t bring herself to wake her at three in the morning just to dig up a corpse. It can wait till the morning.

Bellamy pulls slowly up Clarke’s drive, hand still clasped in hers, like it fits there. He parks and turns the engine and floodlights off, but neither of them move.

“Bellamy,” Clarke starts, but he cuts her off, bringing a hand up to her cheek, the pad of his thumb against her lower lip so she can taste the salt in his skin.

“You always taste the same in the dreams,” he says, not so much a whisper as a shallow exhale, like he’s having trouble catching his breath. “Like something I can’t taste in real life. Mist, or sunlight.”

“You always taste like mint,” Clarke says, and he laughs.

He’s not laughing when he kisses her. He moves slowly, like he’s worried she might want to say no, like he’s giving her time to escape, or turn her head, pull away. But she doesn’t, and he unbuckles his seat belt, leans in, and presses his mouth to hers.

When Clarke was very young, she went fly fishing with Wells and her father. But she couldn’t learn the motions, couldn’t swing the line quite right, and she got bored with the waiting, so she headed downstream to search for tadpoles.

But the rocks were so wet, and slippery, and Clarke’s feet weren’t so sure, and she fell into the water. For just one second, the world was washed away, until all Clarke could feel was the water, soft and slick against her skin, cool against her eyelids. For just one second, Clarke thought she might get washed away, too.

Bellamy pulls back, and Clarke breaks the surface. She can feel the phantom drops of water caught in her eyelashes when she blinks her eyes open, to find him staring back at her. She wonders if he was drowning too.

“Your sister?” Clarke asks, gasping for breath, and now she can see that Bellamy is panting too. He licks his lips, and she shudders. “Is she good for the night?”

He ducks his head to hide his grin, soft and pleased. “Yeah, she texted me at nine to let me know. Are you--should I--”

Clarke nods, unbuckling her own belt and opening the door, stepping out into the night air in a rush. “You should come in,” she says, and feels him follow her to the front door, like a live electrical wire buzzing and sparking at her back.

Their second kiss is lightning, up against the wall inside as Clarke wrinkles the shirt of his uniform even more, and Bellamy mouths purple flowers into her skin.

“Do I still taste like your dream?” she asks, when he pulls back to thumb at her jeans.

He grins, mouth crooked in the moonlight. “Better.”

“You too.” She leads him to her room and they lay out on the mattress like they laid out in the grass the night before. She falls asleep to his hands, warm skin and anchors on her ribcage, and his smile, bright enough to make her burn.

Clarke dreams of splintered wood and sprawling limbs, roots like worms or hair or fingers, digging deep into the earth, tunneling through soil like maggots bore through flesh. She dreams of digging and digging and digging like a dog with a bone, like a pirate with treasure, like a girl with a secret.

Her mother sits at a kitchen table Clarke doesn’t recognize, a potted Bonsai tree in her lap. A tiny apple sprouts from the very top limb, and Abby plucks it, crushing it in between her teeth. She chews and chews and swallows, and then pokes out her tongue, so Clarke can see the single apple seed caught on the tip. Then she swallows that too, and dies from the poison.

 _That isn’t right_ , Clarke says, but her dream-voice is weak. Like it’s trying to swim against the water’s current. _The apple can’t poison us._

 _What is the one thing you can’t live without?_ her mother asks. Death has made her voice stronger, freer, and it flies around the room like an uncaged bird.

Clarke shakes her head, but she moves slower in the dream world. _You always hated riddles_ , she says. _You thought they were children’s games!_

Her mother’s voice ignores her. _What is the one thing you can’t live without?_

Clarke tries to remember the old riddles her grandmother used to feed her and Wells like afternoon snacks. They were hungry for them, for the feeling they got whenever they solved one. Like they were clever, like they’d managed to uncover another of the world’s many secrets, like there wasn’t anything they couldn’t answer, when they tried.

 _What is the one thing you can’t live without?_ her mother’s voice grows shrill and desperate, ringing again and again. _What is the one thing you can’t live without? What is the one thing you can’t live without? What is the one thing you can’t live without?_

Clarke closes her eyes to focus, but dreams are tricky, and closing her eyes has no effect. Even after Anya died, Wells kept looking up riddles on his own. He used to buy the small paper _Reader’s Digest_ ’s at the local gas station, for the ones listed in the back. He’d read his favorites out loud for Clarke to guess at.

_What is the one thing you can’t live without?_

Clarke opens her eyes. She licks her lips, but her tongue is a dry cloth, and her lips crack and start bleeding. The blood tastes like oranges. Her voice is barely anything; a moth flying out of a closet.

 _A body_.

Clarke wakes to the feel of water on her skin, cold and shocking and seeping through the t-shirt and shorts she wore to bed. She opens her eyes to see the sky, pale with morning light, and rolls over in the wet clumps of dirt and grass and crushed flower vines.

She can feel the dirt stuck under her fingernails, staining the cotton of her pajamas, the skin of her bare legs and arms and in between her knuckles. She can taste the grit of earth in her mouth. It only takes Clarke a few seconds to realize where she is.

She’s elbow-deep in the hole where they buried Tristan’s body.

On the ground a few feet away, her phone buzzes, and then again, and again. When Clarke checks the screen, she sees they’re from Raven, dozens of question marks in response to the message she’d sent.

_THEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODYTHEBODY_

Clarke looks down into the grave, even though she already knows what she’ll find there, and then she reaches for her phone, wiping her thumbs off on her shorts the best she can, before typing, smudging dirt and morning dew across the screen.

She texts _we have a problem_ , and then hurries to her feet. Bellamy’s Jeep is still parked out front and if she’s very, very lucky, he’s still asleep in her bed. She kicks at the loose dirt she’d dug up in the night, scurrying to fill up the hole before he might notice. She’ll have to take a shower, and hide her muddied clothes in the depths of her washing machine.

 _what is it?_ Raven texts back, and Clarke sends one last response before she sneaks back inside, careful not to track mud across the kitchen floor, from the soles of her feet.

_tristan’s body is gone_

 


	5. They Say That Stolen Water Tastes Sweet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think I’ll take him to γιavúla,” Clarke says.
> 
> Raven makes a face like she does whenever Clarke mentions anything that has to do with Oreia. Raven has probably suffered through enough strange mountain witchcraft to last her a lifetime. “Is that the old giant tree?”
> 
> “It’s the grandmother of the Oreia,” Clarke corrects. “The oldest tree in these mountains.”
> 
> “Like I said,” Raven agrees.
> 
> She has Raven drop her off in town, and dials Bellamy’s number. He picks up on the second ring.
> 
> “This better be an emergency,” he says, gruff, and Clarke smiles without really meaning to, picking at a loose thread on the thigh of her jeans. 
> 
> “I’m going to ask an old giant tree for advice,” she says. “Want to come?”
> 
> There’s a beat of silence and then a deep sigh. “I think you’d better just explain on the way.”

When Clarke steps out of her shower, skin scrubbed clean and pink from the heat of the water, she finds Bellamy already in the kitchen, fiddling with her coffee machine, struggling to get it to turn on.

“Come on, you bastard,” she hears him grumble under his breath, and then hiss when he gets the skin of his thumb trapped between the lid of the grounds holder.

His hair is a mess, and his uniform shirt, wrinkled beyond hope from a night spent on her floor, is only half-buttoned. Clarke leans against the counter to watch him work.

Bellamy grins in triumph when the machine kicks on with a groan, and when he sees Clarke, his grin turns sheepish. “You should invest in a new one,” he says, and she shrugs.

“That’s just for when Raven visits. I’m more of a tea person.”

He nods, suddenly shy, and Clarke thinks back to what it felt like, to have the weight of him next to her in her bed. Curling into his warmth even as the mountain air turned muggy with summer night, making her sheets stick to their skin until their legs were all tangled. Tracing her fingers down the angles of his bones, the hard press of his muscle, the little bit of flesh around his belly and thighs--it hadn’t felt like her dreams, not really. There was no cool water brimming underneath; there was just him, just her, just the tree frogs chorusing outside her window.

Clarke leans in to kiss him, just as Raven walks in, letting the screen door crash shut behind her. She gives them each an unimpressed look. “Sorry, am I interrupting breakfast?”

The coffee machine gurgles, and Bellamy jumps back, gripping the old tea-stained mug in his hand, so tightly he might break the handle clean off. “No, actually I should get going. I have to check in with my supervisor back in DC, and make sure Octavia’s not playing hookey.”

He gives Clarke an apologetic smile that’s more grimace than not, and she swallows back her disappointment. After all, she’d just woken up in the grave of a dead man who may no longer be dead; she really shouldn’t be thinking about her love life.

“You should use a to-go cup,” she says instead, moving from the small puddle that her dripping hair has created on the tile floor, towards the cupboard where she keeps her plastic ware.

“I’ll be fine,” Bellamy assures her, pouring the slightly burnt coffee into his mug. “I’ll, uh, return this,” he adds, gesturing to the mug itself. It’s a boring one, previously bone white but gone slightly gray with age, a few chips here and there in the top and bottom rims, and a flower painted on the side, nearly smudged away.

“Good,” Clarke says. “That’s one of my favorite mugs.”

He smiles, like he’s in on the joke, and walks out the door with his shirt still half-unbuttoned. She’s not sure he’s noticed.

Once they hear the engine of his Jeep turn over, and the skid of tire on dirt as he backs out of her drive, Raven turns on Clarke like a vulture, ready to pick her apart.

“Nothing happened,” Clarke says, raising both palms, before Raven can start in. “He just stayed the night. We slept together, in pajamas. That’s it.”

Raven looks unconvinced. “That’s _it_?”

Clarke worries her lip a little. There’s no real point in _not_ telling her, and Raven is her best friend. “We kissed. But yeah, other than that, nothing to report.”

“And he just happened to have a spare change of PJ’s on him? What, in the back of his car? He was prepared for a slumber party?”

Clarke feels the skin of her cheeks and neck go red, and Raven rocks back on her heels at the sight, smug. “He slept in his boxers,” she says primly, thinking back to the sight of him, inches of brown, freckled skin that goosebumped under her fingertips as she traced the lines of him like a topographical map.

Raven sighs, a huge gust of air rushing out of her like she’d had it trapped in her lungs for too long. “I can’t believe you didn’t fuck the hot U.S. Marshal,” she says, a little accusatory, and Clarke bristles.

“Sorry I was a little preoccupied with the fact that we have a _corpse_ missing from our backyard,” she hisses, and Raven looks appropriately chastened, like she’d actually _forgotten_ about that part.

“Shit,” she says, glancing out the window towards the grave in question. “Breakfast first,” she decides, marching over to the fridge. “Your creepy Rain Man text woke me up at five AM and I’m starving.” She pulls out a carton of eggs that Clarke doesn’t remember buying. The rest of her fridge is sparse, filled with herbs from her garden, and a few baby tomatoes that she managed to pluck before the deer got to them, but that’s about it. Mostly she just orders in, or eats at Cece’s.

“I can’t believe you’re an adult,” Raven scoffs. “I mean, I may catch things on fire sometimes, but at least I’m self-sufficient.”

“You know you’re living on my couch, right?” Clarke points out, and Raven ignores her, making a show of pulling out a frying pan, and cracking the first egg on its rim.

“What the fuck,” Raven says, and Clarke leans in to look over her shoulder. On the pan, a pool of egg white is spreading out in a puddle and starting to fry. “Where’s the yolk?”

Clarke feels a trickle of dread start low in her stomach, unfurling itself like a snake to slither up her esophagus. She reaches for the next egg from the carton, rubs it twice across her palm, and then fills a glass up with water from the tap, before breaking the egg open above it.

Egg white leaks out, with no sunny yellow center. Clarke shifts the glass and watches as the egg whites break apart and swirl around, forming different shapes like clouds.

“What does it mean?” Raven asks, and Clarke frowns. It’s been years since she’s had anything to do with ooscopy--it never really made much sense to her. It was hard to read that particular language, even if Anya had preferred it over others.

“Nothing good,” Clarke sighs. She can see scraps of a message--bits and pieces. _Stranger_ , or maybe _Visitor_ , or maybe even _Friend_ . She sees _Tree_ , but that could mean anything. She sees _Gift_ , but it could maybe be _Poison_ , instead. There are too many questions and not enough of an answer for her to put it all together. The shapes could mean nothing at all.

But she remembers the stories her grandmother used to tell her, about the _Ichneumon_. About how it could resemble mud and leaves and stone, lying still for hours, until you wandered close enough for it to eat. About how it was the only thing that could live through a basilisk’s stare. About how it was born from a rooster’s egg--an egg with no yolk.

Now, of course, she knows the stories were just that. Stories. Used to frighten children in the Dark Ages, to explain away things that would later be defined by science. But every story comes from a bit of truth, and there was a reason people feared an empty egg. “Bad luck” could mean a lot of things, for an Oreia. And Clarke doesn’t like any of the options.

“Check them all,” she says, nodding to the carton, and Raven grabs two eggs at once, opening them up into the pan. Clarke reaches for two more, and they keep going until the carton is empty, and a pool of egg whites sits on the stove.

All of them are yolkless.

“Okay,” Raven decides, “Fuck breakfast. No way am I eating a bunch of freaky witchcraft eggs. Let’s go check the hole.”

She circles around the haphazardly filled grave a few times, nudging at the loose dirt with the toe of her boot, before finally stopping. “I guess he’s really gone,” she says, and Clarke scowls.

“I already told you that!”

“I’m a woman of science, Clarke,” she sniffs. “I have to observe the evidence with my own eyes. Who do you think took the body?”

Clarke worries the skin on her lip a little. It isn’t cracked and bleeding like in her dream, but the first few layers have been shredded by her teeth, so it won’t be long now. “I’m not so sure he was stolen.”

Raven frowns. “What, you think he just dug himself out and left?” She starts to grow pale the longer Clarke stays silent. “Holy _shit_ , is that even _possible_?”

“Lexa thinks it might be.”

“Wait, back up, you talked to _Lexa_ ?” Raven’s frown deepens, although now it’s the mark of a worried best friend, rather than an accessory to murder. “When? _Why_?”

“Because she’s sort of a death aficionado, remember?” Clarke says, wry. “Bellamy and I drove out there yesterday. Where did you think we were going?”

“I don’t know, a pay-by-the-hour motel? Treasure hunting in the woods? One of those geo-caches that are buried all over the place? You could have been out murdering more birds, for all I knew, Griffin. Why would I assume you were taking your-- _whatever_ Blake is--to see your ex-girlfriend?”

“She was actually very helpful.”

Raven scoffs. “That’s a first.” Then she glances back at the muddied grass and seems to sober. “What did she tell you?”

“Tristan went to her before she came here,” Clarke says, and Raven grumbles something that sounds close to _of course he did_ , under her breath. “For an insurance policy. Lexa gave him a resurrection spell, so that if he died, he could come back to life in three days.” She leaves out the part about the key, not because she doesn’t want Raven to know, but because it’s so complex. Clarke can barely understand it herself, and she’s Oreia.

“Wait, three days?” Raven asks, looking like she’s just had a hook split her open from sternum to naval, and gut her like a fish. “Clarke, he’s been gone since the night that Blake _got_ here?”

Clarke thinks back to that night at the diner, when her nerves were still raw and electric from the thought of the man buried in her backyard. The man who had probably been busy carving himself out of the earth, dirt softened by the hurricane. He’d slithered out into the night as Clarke lined her stomach up with onion rings, for the acid to eat away.

He might have been gone already, by the time Bellamy showed her his picture. And she hadn’t even noticed.

Clarke sinks down from the weight of that realization, until her butt is in the dirt. Her hair is still wet, and the water drips down her arms, turning the earth into mud underneath her. Raven makes a show of situating her leg, bending this way and that so she can sit down beside her, leg brace stretched out in front.

“What now?” Raven asks, and when Clarke doesn’t answer, she sighs, reaching over to pull Clarke in so she’s resting her head on Raven’s bony, uncomfortable shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Clarke admits, choking a little on the words. It’s just--she’d thought she was _onto something_ , with the bird, and then Lexa--and now it turns out that she’s been ten steps behind, the whole time. She feels hollowed-out, completely upturned and emptied out of ideas and plans and answers. All that’s left are the riddles, and dreams, and Bellamy.

She’s still not sure how Bellamy fits into everything, if he even does. But the boy from her childhood subconscious arrived in her town the same night that the man she murdered came back to life; it’s hard to look at something like that and deem it _coincidence_.

“Hey,” Raven says, jostling Clarke’s head a little, by rolling her shoulder. Raven is all skin and bone and taught muscle, these days, but she still somehow manages to stay soft. “Don’t think so much. Not every problem in the world is _your_ problem.”

Clarke thinks about the first time she met Raven Reyes. They’d been young, young enough so that Raven’s trailer park and alcoholic mother, and Clarke’s psychic family and mentions of _witchcraft_ , didn’t matter.

Someone, an older kid, had been bullying Wells. They were always bullying Wells back then, either because of his starched and stainless clothes, or because of the way he talked with words they couldn’t understand, or the way he was quiet and kept to himself mostly, or the way he was best friends with a girl. Clarke’s seen a fair amount of teen high school dramas, where the victims of bullies are always the scrawny white chess-players who fall over themselves when they try to throw a football. By the time she and Wells made it to high school, his days of being bullied were a thing of the past; it’s hard to be cruel to someone you’ve known your whole life, and in a school of barely a hundred students, it’s even harder. But her early childhood had taught Clarke that real life isn’t like television makes it out to be. Anyone can be a victim, and not just because you aren’t good at sports, or don’t have that many friends. But because for the people who bully, it’s nothing but a game, and the only rule is _don’t be weak_.

Raven Reyes had an origin story that made her a prime target for bullying--the only child of a neglectful drunk, raised in the sandlot of a trailer park filled mostly with agoraphobic Korean War vets and the kind of people who end up on _Dateline_. But Raven was far from weak--building remote-control cars with the old TV controllers and spare bits of plastic from the park’s dumpster, in her spare time. Ignoring anyone who taunted her, and hitting them if they were too loud to ignore.

By all rights, she should have hated Clarke Griffin and Wells Jaha, the golden children of Mt. Weather’s elite. If life was an afternoon teen special, she _would_ have hated them.

But instead she just stumbled upon Wells, being bullied by a boy twice his size, and Raven hauled off and kicked the older kid in the shin, for good measure.

They were inseparable after that, with Raven even spending the night at Clarke’s, more often than not. They used to fall asleep outside on one of Anya’s old, soft downy quilts, looking up at the stars as Clarke detailed all the stories that her dream-boy told her each night.

 _That isn’t some ancient queen,_ Raven said once, after listening to the history of Cassiopeia, _those are just giant balls of gas. They’re already dead and burned out by the time we see them._

Clarke just shrugged, and moved onto Orion, and even though Raven sometimes interrupted her, to prove her wrong, she still always wanted to know how the stories ended. They’d fall asleep out on the front lawn, and Clarke’s dad would have to come collect them, and carry them upstairs to her bed.

Clarke still remembers the first fight, _real_ fight, they ever had. They were fourteen, freshman in high school and so close to adulthood that they could taste it on their fingertips.

Raven’s mom got drunk on a bunch of those miniature bottles of liquor on sale at the 5-and-Dime threw a plate at her head, and Raven didn’t duck in time. Abby stitched her eyebrow up with her emergency med kit, over their kitchen sink, and slathered it with comfrey and clary sage oil for good measure. Clarke pretended to focus on preparing tea, while she listened to her mom try and reason with Raven. She wanted to report her mother to the police, to CPS, to _someone_ who might be able to get Raven out of that trailer for good--but Raven didn’t want her to.

Raven won, in the end, and Clarke burned her hand on the kettle.

 _I just don’t understand why you want to stay with her_ , Clarke said, once Abby had left them alone, and Raven had enough with her passive aggressively slamming the cupboards.

 _It’s not like I have a_ choice, Raven snapped back, and Clarke bristled.

 _But you_ do _have one! You have_ us _\--we’d take you in a heartbeat, and you know it!_

 _Not all of us are fucking_ royalty _, Clarke. We can’t all just cast a spell or call up the mayor and get our way,_ Raven sneered, and Clarke winced like she’d been slapped. She’d grown up hearing taunts like _witch_ and _princess--_ but it had never come from _Raven_.

 _I’m starting to think_ this _is your choice,_ Clarke said, gesturing to the freshly-stitched slice on her forehead. _You let her hit you and then you always come here, you eat all our food, you sleep in my bed, you keep your clothes and books here, but then you always go back to her._

Raven stared hard at her, and it took Clarke a moment to realize it was because she was trying not to cry. She swiped her bony wrists against both eyes, angry and hissing, and hopped down from her perch on the counter. Clarke felt all her words turn to ash in her mouth, regret an angry hungry thing, coiling in her stomach.

 _Fuck you, Griffin_ , Raven said, so quiet that it didn’t even hurt. Clarke reached for her, but she was too quick, and left through the front door in a whirlwind.

Clarke found her mother standing in the hallway, looking heavy and judgmental. She didn’t say anything, which just made everything worse. Abby Griffin had an opinion on most things, but she tended to dole them out in single servings, like she was rationing them, trying to make her words last.

Raven didn’t speak to Clarke, or even look at her, for twelve days. She avoided her in the halls at school. She didn’t sit with her at lunch, and Wells was forced to go back and forth between them, unable to pick sides, even though Clarke knew he thought she was in the wrong. She didn’t blame him; she thought she was, too. But apologies had never come easy to her, and Raven wasn’t interested in hearing she was sorry. Raven wasn’t interested in anything from her. Clarke had lost her best friends, and it was her own fault. She thought she might let the guilt eat away at her, until there was nothing left but a pile of gnawed-on bones in the shape of Clarke Griffin.

But in the end, death reached her father first, and Clarke woke one night to the feeling of Raven sliding into bed with her, wrapping her up in her long bony limbs, holding her so tight she almost couldn’t breathe.

 _I’m sorry_ , Clarke whispered, and she didn’t realize she was crying until Raven used the corner of her bed sheet, to wipe at her eyes.

 _Me too_ , she said, and just like that it was over, and Clarke knew she’d never lose her, again.

Raven cradles her head now like she did that night, patting a dirt-stained palm against Clarke’s cheek. “What about the Marshal?”

Clarke hums a little, thinking. Bellamy’s already too tangled up in the web of Mt. Weather; cutting him out at this point would just make him even more vulnerable.

And there’s the fact that her bed probably still smells like him. Like cinnamon-scented boy shampoo, and the cool mint of his aftershave, and something else that feels inherently _Bellamy_. Woodsmoke, or sunlight. Something from a dream.

“I think I’ll take him to _γιavúla,”_ Clarke says.

Raven makes a face like she does whenever Clarke mentions anything that has to do with Oreia. Raven has probably suffered through enough strange mountain witchcraft to last her a lifetime. “Is that the old giant tree?”

Clarke frowns. She’s explained enough of her existence to Raven over the years, that her friend should really know that _γιavúla_ is much more than an _old, giant tree_. “It’s the grandmother of the Oreia,” Clarke corrects. “The oldest tree in these mountains.”

“Like I said,” Raven agrees, starting to stand, and Clarke sighs, taking Raven’s offered hand, to help her upright.

They wash up inside, and Clarke agrees to let Raven borrow her truck again, for her shift at the garage. She rushes through changing, so she almost doesn’t notice the note scribbled on what looks like the back of a receipt from Cece’s, and left sitting on her bedside table.

The handwriting looks familiar, even though Clarke knows she’s never seen it before. _For case and zombie bird-related emergencies,_ it reads, and then a phone number scrawled underneath it. Clarke can’t swallow her grin as she stuffs it into her pocket, and heads out the door.

She has Raven drop her off in town, and even though odds are she could just walk over to the bed and breakfast, or the diner, or Wells’, Clarke makes her way to the only public outside bench--a splintering thing sitting outside the post office, and dials Bellamy’s number. He picks up on the second ring.

“This better be an emergency,” he says, gruff, and Clarke smiles without really meaning to, picking at a loose thread on the thigh of her jeans. They’re an old pair, worn thin from the wash and from age. There are faded ink lines, from when she and Wells played tic-tac-toe on her knee, during award ceremonies in high school.

“I’m going to ask an old giant tree for advice,” she says. “Want to come?”

There’s a beat of silence and then a deep sigh. “I think you’d better just explain on the way.”

Clarke hauls herself into his Jeep when he pulls up to her curb of sidewalk. The metal’s beginning to flake around the frame of her door, and her palms come back covered in cinnamon-brown. The radio is on this time, low and soft, playing the only station they get this far out--old-style country music with a few NPR shows intermittently.

“So there are talking trees now?” Bellamy says in greeting, but when she catches his eye, he goes soft at the edges, lashes fluttering against his cheek.

“Every living thing can communicate,” Clarke shrugs. “It’s just figuring out how to translate it, that’s the hard part.”

Bellamy gives her his most unimpressed look, which seems fair. This case has put him through more than his fair share of mystical bullshit; this is no time for her to start echoing Anya’s cryptic shreds of metaphor.

“It’s called _γιavúla,_ ” Clarke says, and pointing for Bellamy to turn right at the stop sign. He doesn’t bother with the GPS this time, which is just as well. The roads can only take them so far, this time. They’ll have to do a bit of the trip on foot.

“And it’s a tree?”

“The oldest tree in these mountains,” Clarke corrects, automatic, and Bellamy snorts.

“Sorry. So what does this magic old tree _do_?”

“It’s--” Clarke hesitates, unsure how to really explain it. She’s tried before, with Raven and Wells, but it had never made sense to them, not like it did to her. She’d assumed it was just something that was meant for Oreia; humans couldn’t ever understand something that was built into her bones.

She waves for him to take a left up onto a winding dirt path just barely wide enough to allow his car passage. “We call her grandmother,” she says, finally. He probably still won’t understand, but she wants to try anyway. She wants him to know all of her, even the unknowable parts. “All the Oreia in these mountains are descended from her.”

Bellamy keeps his gaze firmly on the road. The sunlight filters through green and pale yellow leaves up above them, like a tunnel made of sprawling limbs and summer, casting shadows across his skin. “Your grandmother’s a tree,” he says, careful, and Clarke laughs.

“Not--we weren’t born from a _tree_ ,” she gets out, in between breaths, and Bellamy turns to glare at her, defensive.

“Well, what was I supposed to assume?”

“You honestly thought that a tree gave birth to us,” Clarke gasps, and she starts laughing all over again.

“I thought it gave birth to one of your _parents_ ,” Bellamy points out, like that’s somehow better. “That’s what _grandmother_ means.”

Clarke wipes a few stray tears from her eyes, and when she looks back at him, she finds him grinning at the steering wheel, so at least he finds it funny too.

The radio station stutters and then cuts to static. “Pull over here,” Clarke instructs, and Bellamy does his best to sidle the Jeep over off the side of the road. It doesn’t do much; the path is too narrow for another car to make its way around theirs, but it’s the thought that counts.

Bellamy turns the key so the engine cuts off. “Now what?”

Clarke’s eyes catch on one of the buttons on his uniform shirt. He must have missed it when he hurriedly dressed in the car, on his way to the bed and breakfast. Clarke thinks about hooking her finger into the material, using it to pull him closer, over the console so they can meet in the middle. She thinks about how he might taste, like her coffee and Cece’s scrambled eggs. How he might feel pressed against her, hands on her skin, warm and calloused like the night before.

Clarke swallows the image down with so many others, and unbuckles her seat belt. “Now we hike.”

The forest surrounding Mount Weather has no name, like so many others on the mountain, but Clarke thinks that if it did, it would be something like _home-of-ten-thousand-spider-webs_. Bellamy makes a noise when he stumbles through another one, flailing a little to pull the sticky strings from his hair. Clarke stifles a scream when she steps into a third.

“I always try to keep my mouth closed,” she admits, as Bellamy brushes the remnants of a web from her nose. “I saw a documentary at school once, about how we swallow seven spiders a night, and it fucked me up.”

“That’s actually a myth,” Bellamy says, and Clarke frowns.

“What about the one where they could crawl into your ear canals and lay eggs in your brain?” she asks, and he doesn’t answer.

“Aren’t you supposed to be one with nature, or something?” Bellamy asks, watching as Clarke dances around like a cat, trying to comb the threads from her hair. She throws a pine cone at his face.

“Aren’t you supposed to be an officer of the law?”

“What do you want me to do, shoot the spiders?” Bellamy offers, wry, and Clarke actually takes a moment to consider it.

She says no, of course. After all, it’s not like the spiders are doing anything _wrong_.

Their hike isn’t a very long one. _γιavúla_ needed to be in a place easily accessible to all of her Oreia children, but far enough from the human world that she wouldn’t be chopped down for firewood, or cleared away to make room for a shopping mall. She was thinking of them, even in her last moments.

“Her name was _Rivkah_. Rebecca,” Clarke says, stepping carefully to avoid the foxholes and the canals that burrow through the ground, filled with murky rain water and forest sludge and water moccasins. Bellamy takes her hand as she moves, to help balance her. But even when she finds her footing, he doesn’t let go.

“The grandma tree?”

Clarke rolls her eyes. “ _Yes_ , the grandma tree. She was the first of our kind. The first _mountain daughter_.”

“The first Oreia?” Bellamy asks, sounding curious, and Clarke’s only a little surprised that he’s still listening. Usually by now, she’d lost Raven completely, and even Wells who had _wanted_ to learn, just couldn’t wrap his mind around it all.

“No, Oreia is--our species,” Clarke explains. “But there are different, sort of, _races_ , I guess? And _mountain daughter_ is one of them. We had another name, before, but it’s been forgotten.”

Bellamy still has hold of her hand, and so when his foot slips and he nearly falls, she anchors him. “Thanks,” he says, gruff and embarrassed, and Clarke bites back a laugh.

Clarke remembers being young, stumbling through the forest and clinging to Anya’s withered hand, as they walked. She remembers when Anya told her the story of _Rivkah_ , opening the door into _γιavúla,_ having to duck her head to walk inside. She remembers seeing the rows and rows of tokens, sacrifices, gifts. She remembers seeing dozens of Oreia, Anya introducing them one by one, family members that Clarke barely knew but somehow recognized in a way other than sight.

And then Anya died, and they burned her like she wanted, and spread her ashes out over the Catawba River, so she could finally know rest. And Abby had never much liked the thought of _γιavúla._ She didn’t like the old ways, the ways brought over the ocean so long ago. She was a woman of science, of growth, and change. And Jake just never had the time, and so _γιavúla_ stood forgotten.

Clarke came back once, after her father’s funeral. Her mother had him buried in the earth, in the county cemetery, with a headstone that they could visit every year on his birthday, or Christmas. Something tangible, for them--but nothing for her father. The dead aren’t needy, like the living.

And Clarke was fourteen, and broken, and drunk on the expensive whiskey her father kept in the bottom of his desk. She walked the three miles in darkness, stumbling along the way, ignoring the snakes and spiders and other nightmare things. She was a nightmare too, all red eyes and hands scrubbed raw because she kept washing them with cheap soap, trying to get the blood off. There was so much blood, when Jake Griffin died, so much more than there’d been with Anya, and Abby tried to explain that it happened like that sometimes, but Clarke didn’t want an explanation, or a history lesson, or sympathetic arms. She wanted her dad back, and so she went to _γιavúla,_ because Anya used to say that if you asked _grandmother_ for something, sometimes she would give.

Clarke tore her hands through the dirt at the foot of the tree, clawing for the roots down and deep underneath her. And then she pressed her face into the earth and screamed. She gave the tree her voice, and her pain, and her tears, and she hoped it was enough payment. She didn’t have anything else.

She woke up at sunrise, skin slick and cold with morning mountain dew, hair gnarled with mud and twigs, clothes stained and ruined. Her father was still dead, but when she stood she saw the hole where she’d screamed herself hoarse was newly covered up. A sprig of blue hydrangeas blossomed, as if they’d been there the whole time. When Clarke reached to touch one of the petals, it fell apart in her hand like ashes.

Clarke hasn’t been back to _γιavúla_ since that night ten years ago, but she still knows the way by heart, the same way she always knows which way is north, the same way she always knows where Sirius sits in the sky. She leads Bellamy by the hand, fingers laced through hers like they belong there, and find _γιavúla_ right where she’d left it.

“Wow,” Bellamy breathes, staring up at the sky, where the grandmother tree stretches on and on towards the sun. Clarke knows the feeling; there are certain places in this world, that feel too big and important and _other_ to exist. There are certain places that make your chest ache with how _much_ they are, that take your breath away and leave you winded and a little light-headed with it all.

She tugs on Bellamy’s hand, leading him around the huge gnarled roots that poke out of the earth like jagged bones sprouting through skin. They have to duck and step over the bigger branches, which have grown too heavy to stand upright and instead sag towards the ground in a maze of wind-smoothed bark and evergreen leaves. “Come on, the door’s this way.”

“We’re going _inside it_ ?” Bellamy asks, but follows her anyway. Clarke hums, searching for the tell-tale seams in the bark, like an _enter here_ sign carved in live oak.

She finds it easily enough, but it’s grown-over now, with ivy and morning glory and kudzu vines that she pulls away from the hinges, so she can pull open the hatch. It swings out with a groan of old age. She wonders how long its been since _γιavúla_ has been visited by any of her children. How long has it stood forgotten in this forest, patiently waiting for someone to come? Trees like this one survive off of offerings. The grandmother tree has been hungry for years.

There are crude stone steps that lead them down to the hollowed-out cavern. Anya called it a temple, but it’s more like a root cellar, filled with ancient cans of dried fruit smothered in grime, and old hand-made dream catchers with goose feathers and string, and what might have once been a pressed tulip but has now crumbled away to near nothing. All of these gifts line the driftwood shelves nailed into the tree’s walls, and Clarke studies each one, wondering who left it.

She turns to find Bellamy studying an etch-a-sketch, wiping at the dust with his fingers, streaked across the screen. Clarke smiles, crossing over. “I left that when I was six,” she says, memories yellowed with age and tinged with fondness. “When Anya, my grandmother--my _real_ grandmother--took me here, the first time.”

Bellamy turns the knobs this way and that, until he’s made a knobby gray circle. “Doesn’t seem very sacrifice-y,” he says, and Clarke rolls her eyes.

“It’s an _offering_. It doesn’t have to be something expensive or important, as long as it’s important to you. Something that’s hard to give up.”

“And what happens when you do?” he asks, carefully setting the toy back where he found it. Anya’s carved wooden ring sits beside it, a willow stag’s head with toothpick branches tangled up in cobweb.

Clarke shrugs. “Maybe nothing. It depends on what you want. A favor, or a blessing. Advice. Sometimes the offering isn’t enough for what you’re asking, and it doesn’t work. But sometimes it does.” She fumbles with the clasp of her father’s watch for a moment, before finally taking it off, and lying the glass and cracked leather down on the shelf. _Please_ , she thinks, _help me figure this out. Help me find the answers._ She doesn’t specify which questions she has--she’s worried there are too many, and they’re too complex. She hopes _γιavúla_ will just know.

When Clarke opens her eyes, she sees Bellamy standing at a cleared spot, across the way. He takes his wallet, the cheap plain kind sold in clearance aisles at drug stores, and pulls something out, placing it on the shelf. When Clarke moves closer, she sees that it’s a dried flower petal, the same shade of blue as her eyes, a strange star-like shape that she’s only seen in her dreams.

“You kept them?” she asks, surprised. She tries to imagine a younger version of the man in front of her, startled to find blue flowers on his pillow when he woke up. She imagines him placing them carefully inside a book, pressing and drying them and carrying them around, the way some people carry pictures of their children. She wonders if he’s been carrying them with him through Mount Weather this whole time, if they were waiting in his back pocket that night she first saw him.

Bellamy flushes a little in the dim light, putting his wallet back in place. “Not all of us are magic,” he says. “I had to carry what little bit I did have.”

“You are magic,” Clarke blurts, and she hates that he looks so surprised, so confused, like he’s not sure why anyone might think he’s special. Bellamy Blake has stars on his cheeks and pulls flowers from his dreams and when he kissed her it felt like a hurricane. Bellamy Blake is a miracle wrapped up in brown freckled skin. “I don’t know what kind, but--you are. You’re magic, Bellamy.”

For a moment she almost think he’ll try to argue, but then a smile starts to spread slow across his mouth, and he ducks his head to hide it. “I really don’t think I should kiss you inside your grandma,” he says, and Clarke laughs.

“So let’s leave,” she teases, and leads the way up the stones.

Outside the air smells like rain and electricity. Clarke feels the soft hit of water as it lands on her hair, her shoulders and arms. Beside her, Bellamy swears.

“It is hurricane season,” she points out as they round the tree’s width. There’s a small clump of blue hydrangeas at its base, right where she remembers. She doesn’t bother trying to touch them again.

The rain starts to pour down, buckets and buckets of it washing over them as they run through the trees, as fast as they dare, wary of slipping over the patchwork of wet leaves and needles. Clarke can feel Bellamy, the warmth of him just at her back as he chases her through the woods, gone a hazy dusk-blue from the storm. She hears him swear as he nearly loses his footing, and she tips her head back and laughs, feeling the shock of bright lightning deep in her skin, all the way to the toes going numb in her soaked-through shoes.

They reach the Jeep at the same time, slamming into the side, out of breath and giddy with it, rain dripping down their chins and their necks and their noses, into their eyes and mouths as they clamber inside. Clarke’s hair is a mass of tangles on her head, and Bellamy knots his fingers up in them, pulling her close.

This kiss is the thunder that shakes the metal around them as they laugh. Bellamy’s hand moves down the slick skin of her neck, thumb dipping into the valley under her windpipe, and Clarke licks the rainwater from his jaw.

Clarke tucks her finger into the unbuttoned gap of his shirt like a fishhook, just like she imagined, and Bellamy groans into her mouth.

He tugs at the collar of her shirt, moving his tongue along the skin there until she’s shivering from the feel of it. The rain continues on like a hammer across the roof of the Jeep, drowning out everything--the world, the case, their thoughts, until all that’s left is Clarke’s hands in Bellamy’s hair and his mouth on her neck and the sound of their heartbeats aligning.

Bellamy’s the one to pull back first, in the end. He’s still breathing hard--they both are--little bursts of hot breath landing on each other’s lips,  foreheads slicking together, still wet. His eyes are closed, but Clarke’s are wide open. His hand still rests heavy on the side of her neck, and he swipes his thumb across her jaw.

“What did you ask for,” he breathes, “When you left the watch?”

Clarke has to take a moment to clear her head of all the veins of lightning still pulsing there, leftover from Bellamy’s mouth on hers, before she can think. “Answers.”

His eyes open slowly, eyelashes still tangled up with drops of rain, and Clarke reaches to brush them dry. “About this?”

She leans in to press her lips, closed and chaste, against the corner of his own. “I don’t need answers about this.”

“Me neither,” he says, and they sit for a moment in the twilight as the storm outside begins to fade.

The radio cuts on as abruptly as it’d cut off before, nothing but loud static and the low murmur of what could be voices, but might be something else. Bellamy stares at the box in confusion. “The car isn’t even on.”

“You watched a bird come back to life two days ago,” Clarke points out, and he shakes his head, firing up the ignition.

“Anytime this town wants to stop being creepy, that would be great.” He has to flick on his floodlights halfway back, because the mountain roads are tricky and the trees are filled with deer. The storm has painted the sky a dark blue, the sun apparently deciding to take the day off early.

“Do you think she’ll help?” Bellamy asks. “ _Rivkah_?”

Clarke hums, thinking back to the morning she woke up in the forest. The flowers that _γιavúla_ had given her, because it couldn’t bring back Jake Griffin, but it could let her know that it heard her, and it hurt for her, and it cared.

“I think she’ll try,” she decides, and guides their way home.

They’re just fifteen minutes from town when Bellamy’s phone starts to go off, a series of notifications one after the other, all tumbling after themselves in a race. In the back pocket of her still-soaked jeans, Clarke’s phone begins to vibrate, and she feels the snake of worry starting up in her gut again, the one that’s been lying in wait since that morning with the eggs.

She checks her screen to find more than a dozen missed calls from Raven and Wells and nearly every other contact in her phone book. Beside her, Bellamy speeds the rest of the way home and gets them there in record time.

Clarke’s barely pulled up the first voice mail before Bellamy’s pulled up to the bed and breakfast. Raven’s recorded voice is fuzzy, the signal bad, but she can make out more than enough.

_“It’s burning, someone--everything’s going up in flames!”_

Clarke drops the phone completely as she rushes to undo her seat belt and step out of the car. Bellamy’s already moving towards the crowd of county deputies and the volunteer firefighters dressed sloppily in their uniforms, like they’d been in a rush. Clarke can’t do much more than stare straight ahead of her, eyes watering from the smoke.

The bed and breakfast is gone, hollowed-out and charred, a mass of scorched timber and ashes.

“Octavia!” Bellamy’s shouting. “Where’s my sister?” Clarke tries to pace her breathing, tries not to assume the worst.

 _We don’t know if anyone was inside_ , she tells herself. _We don’t know if anyone was hurt. It could have been completely empty. It could have been--_

“Bell!” Octavia comes rushing out of the sheriff’s office across the street, wearing a knitted blanket around her shoulders like a cape as she runs into her brother’s arms.

“We tried to call you,” Raven says, limping up to Clarke’s side. She’s covered in smoke dust, stuck to the sweat on her skin. Wells isn’t far behind her. “The storm helped put it out. Otherwise, it probably would have just burned to the ground.”

“What happened?” Clarke asks, turning back to what used to be the prettiest house on State Street. “Was it electrical?”

“Maybe,” Raven says, though she sounds unconvinced. “Clarke, it was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. One second, everything was fine, and the next, the whole place was on fire.”

“Clarke,” Wells steps closer, voice hushed like he’s worried someone else might hear. “There’s something else you should know.” He pulls out his phone, thumbing in the passcode and swiping through his photo gallery, before showing her the screen. He must have taken the picture during the fire; it’s the bed and breakfast, with flames rising through the roof and stretching like limbs out every window.

Clarke hasn’t done much pyroscopy in her life. The closest she ever came was when Anya took her to visit some Oreia in a neighboring town. It was the equinox, and they were burning sweetgrass and copal around the property. In the center of the yard there was a pit dug into the ground and lined with heavy stones brought up from the river. They collected boughs of hemlock and cedar, and piled them inside the pit to burn.

Clarke sat at the edge of the fire as the sun set, staring into the flames, trying to pick out any messages the sparks were trying to send her. It was hard to read the fire, constantly moving and shrinking and growing, and Clarke was young and new to divination.

She looks at Wells’ phone now, at the photograph he’s taken, and most of it means nothing. Most of the billows of flames and furls and sparks are unreadable, nonsense; just fire--but one spot in particular, near the upstairs left window, is clear. It’s an infinity symbol.

But that isn’t what Clarke focuses on. She tilts the screen so the day’s last bit of light hits it from a different angle, and then looks back up at the house, turned into a gaping mouth by the shadows.

The fire was black.


	6. Underneath This Skin There's A Human

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What if,” he swallows and she hears the thickness of it as he works his throat. “Clarke, what if I pulled all of this from my dreams? What if I pulled you from my dreams, and I just don’t know it? What if this case, this town, all of it isn’t even real?”
> 
> “Okay,” she says. “Breathe, Bellamy, breathe. You didn’t pull me out of a dream, alright? I’m real, I’ve always been real.”
> 
> “How do you know?” he asks, sounding desperate. “For sure, how do you know?”
> 
> Clarke takes his hand, gripping his first three fingers, and brings them to her arm, to trace the scar there. “I got that when Raven and Wells dared me to climb up a deer stand, and the wood in the floor was all rotted, so I fell through.” She moves his hand to the soft skin of her thigh, just an inch under the hem of her underwear. “That’s from when Lexa and I were using candles in bed, and she accidentally dripped hot wax on me.” She pulls his hand up, palm flat, and lays it over the skin of her chest, where her heart beats, steady and alive. “I’m real,” she promises, and he lets out a breath. “I’ve always been real. I had a whole life before you showed up in my dreams, Bellamy Blake.”

_“Lightning, thunder, rain,”_ Anya says, counting each off on a finger. Clarke glances around; they’re outside, in Anya’s garden. She has a metal table that used to be painted white, but flecks off in chips when she runs her hands along the surface. It’s where Anya likes to do her messy readings; ash and smoke and red dye. Sometimes she’ll dip clothes into colored water and leave them on the table, to dry in the sun.

 _“What?”_ Clarke asks, but her voice feels funny. Not like a voice at all, but something softer, and more tangible. Like an insect crawling up her throat.

 _“Storms always come in three’s,”_ Anya clicks her tongue as a kitten crawls across the table, dipping its face in her cup of tea, to give a curious sniff. Anya’s house was always crawling with cats, even though none of them were hers. This one is a cloudy gray with white paws like mittens, and a peanut butter-brown stripe down the length of its nose.

Clarke feels something bite at the heel of her foot, the sting of a fire ant, and when she looks down she finds that she’s naked, and sunburned, skin peeling where it’s gone bright red. Now that she notices, Anya is naked too, apparently unconcerned. _“This is a dream_ ,” Clarke realizes.

 _“Life is a dream,”_ Anya says. _“Only death is real. When you die, you wake.”_

 _“Is that what happened to you?”_ Clarke asks, as Anya pours her tea in a second bone-china cup, and slides it over. It smells like cinnamon and lemongrass, and at the bottom of the cup, an iris blooms. _“When you died, did you wake up somewhere else?”_

Anya clicks her tongue again, but this time Clarke’s the cat. _“I did not wake_ ,” she sighs. _“I grew.”_

 _“Like Rivkah?”_ Clarke frowns. _“But I saw your body. We spread your ashes over the water.”_

 _“Sometimes, we are more than blood and dust,”_ Anya says, holding up three fingers. _“Lightning, thunder, rain.”_

Clarke wipes at the sweat leaking into her eyes, as the sun scalds her back like an iron. _“I don’t understand what that means!”_

Anya looks unimpressed with her, as firm-backed and stern as she was in life. _“You called in the storm without knowing. Lightning, thunder, rain. Until all three have come, the storm cannot pass on.”_

 _“Are you talking about Tristan?”_ The insect in Clarke’s voice becomes a vicious, buzzing thing, a hornet in a rage. Like it’s trying to keep her from speaking. _“Or Bellamy?”_

 _“Drink your tea,”_ Anya says, nodding to the untouched cup. _“It’s getting cold.”_

Clarke knows the nature of dreams; they need to be listened to. So she takes the cup in both hands, and swallows the warmth of it down.

The tea catches the lump in her throat like a net of herbs and water, and Clarke splutters as she spits it back out. A cicada lands in the dregs of her drink at the bottom of the cup, on what’s left of the iris. She watches it drown in an inch of brown tea.

Anya nods to herself at the sight, like she’d been expecting it. _“Summer will end soon,”_ she says, shooing a caramel-colored kitten from the plate of pastries. _“Best finish up your canning soon, before the leaves change.”_ She takes the plate and offers it to Clarke. _“Take a fortune.”_

Clarke takes the topmost biscuit, and cracks it in half, but all she finds is a ribbon. It’s soft and smooth and a deep emerald green. _“What does this mean?”_

Anya opens her mouth, and rocks pour out one by one, clattering against the table like fists against a door.

Clarke opens her eyes, just inches from the edge of her bed, legs all twisted and tangled up in her sweat-soaked sheets, hair a nest of braided knots and mouth stale from sleep. Across the room, someone knocks on her bedroom door, again.

Bellamy’s voice comes through, soft and urgent. “Clarke? Wake up.”

Clarke struggles to free her feet and readjust her shirt even though there’s really no point; it’s a small thin tank top, because summer nights in the mountain sometimes feel like she’s trudging through swamp water. She’s wearing a pair of old, boring underwear, and nothing else. It doesn’t leave much up to the imagination.

But, this is the man who’s given her subconscious orgasms, and slept in her bed. Her mind is still a little foggy from sleep, and reeling from the dream itself, and Clarke doesn’t really much care if Bellamy can see her breasts through her shirt.

She opens the door to his bedhead and wrinkled sleep shirt, and if she wasn’t more preoccupied with the concern on his face, she’d consider asking him to move in permanently, so she could wake up to this sight everyday.

“What happened?” she asks, eyeing him up and down. He doesn’t _look_ injured, but looks aren’t everything. Her father looked fine the morning that he died, one minute reading the crossword out loud and the next, doubled over with dark rivers of blood leaking out through his skin.

“I don’t know, I--” Bellamy runs a hand through his messy hair, clearly unsure how to explain himself. Finally he sighs, tipping his head towards the living room. “You should probably just come and see for yourself.” She follows him down the hall and through the kitchen, to the couch, opened up like a yawning mouth for him to make his bed in.

It wasn’t hard, to convince the Blake siblings to stay at Clarke’s for the night. Raven was already planning to sleep at Wells’ anyway, and Clarke just had to pull down the air mattress from the small crawlspace that serves as an attic, for Octavia to lay out on the dining room floor.

“It’s just for tonight,” Bellamy must have said half a dozen times, clearly uncomfortable with the thought of intruding. “Just until I can find us a new hotel in the morning.”

“Bellamy if I didn’t want you to stay, I wouldn’t have offered,” Clarke said finally, putting the conversation to rest. “And besides, if anymore freaky magic shit happens, I want to be there.”

That got a smile, or at least part of one, out of him. “Freaky magic shit?”

She shrugged; she might as well call it what it was. “Dead birds coming back to life, a black fire burning down the bed and breakfast, the boy from my childhood dreams showing up at my doorstep--”

“I just figured that was a normal August for you,” Bellamy grinned, and Clarke hit him with a pillow.

She stares down at that pillow, now, with a faded sunflower pattern printed across the cotton. There’s the slight indentation from where Bellamy had laid his head, and above that, a line of hollowed-out cicada shells sit like a crescent-moon. Or a crown.

“Where did they come from?” Clarke asks, reaching out a finger to touch one. It crumbles a little under her hand.

“I don’t know,” Bellamy says, looking pained. “But I--I think they came from me. I think they came from my dream, like the flowers.” He turns to look at her, eyes wide and more shaken than she’s ever seen him. “What if,” he swallows and she hears the thickness of it as he works his throat. “Clarke, what if I pulled all of this from my dreams? What if I pulled _you_ from my dreams, and I just don’t know it? What if this case, this town, all of it isn’t even real?”

He looks like he’s on the verge of collapsing, and so Clarke takes him by the arm, steering him so that he sits with his knees bent on the edge of the mattress, head in his hands.

“Okay,” she says, shushing him a little and brushing the hair, still a little damp from sleep sweat, from his forehead, the way her mom used to do when she was comforting Clarke. “Breathe, Bellamy, _breathe_. You didn’t pull me out of a dream, alright? I’m real, I’ve always been real.”

“How do you know?” he asks, sounding desperate. “For sure, how do you _know_?”

Clarke takes his hand, gripping his first three fingers, and brings them to her arm, to trace the scar there. “I got that when Raven and Wells dared me to climb up a deer stand, and the wood in the floor was all rotted, so I fell through.” She moves his hand to the crescent-shaped mark on the knuckle of her thumb. “That’s from my dad’s pocket knife, he let me borrow to try and make a walking stick when I was eight.” She moves his hand to the soft skin of her thigh, just an inch under the hem of her underwear. “That’s from when Lexa and I were using candles in bed, and she accidentally dripped hot wax on me.” She pulls his hand up, palm flat, and lays it over the skin of her chest, where her heart beats, steady and alive. “I’m real,” she promises, and he lets out a breath. “I’ve always been real. I had a whole life before you showed up in my dreams, Bellamy Blake.”

Bellamy nods because he knows she’s right; he must have his own memories, from before the strange dream-girl. But how many times had his memories turned out to be false stories conjured up in his sleep? How many times had he woken up to find that he’d brought a piece of a nightmare back with him? Clarke tries to wonder what it must be like, not being able to trust his own mind. What it must be like, to know that waking up doesn’t always mean the bad dream is over.

Clarke glances back to the cicada corpses, still tidily lined up on the pillow. “How often does this happen?”

Bellamy shakes his head, hand still laid over her chest, over her heart, like he needs to keep it there as an anchor. “Not since I was a kid. It stopped after our dreams did. Eighth grade, maybe. The last thing I woke up with was a butterfly, for Octavia. It glowed in the dark, but when she touched it, it turned into smoke.”

“Can you control it?”

“I wish,” he grins a little wryly. “It’s not--I never knew when I was doing it. I’d just wake up sometimes, and there’d be something on my pillow. Something that shouldn’t have been real.”

“These look real enough,” Clarke points at the crown of insects, but when she looks closer, she sees that they don’t, not really. She’s lived in the Blue Ridge her whole life, now; she knows what a cicada is supposed to look like, and these ones seem a little bit off.

Bellamy picks one up gingerly, cupping it in his hand like it’s still alive, and it only crumbles at the edges a little bit. He holds it out for her to inspect, and Clarke runs a finger lightly over the ridges of its back. The pad of her skin comes back dusted with a dirt-colored powder. She recognizes the smell from Anya’s favorite batch of incense.

“Mugwort,” Clarke says, staring down at the insect, which isn’t really an insect at all. She glances back at the rest of them, and finds them identical to the first. “They’re made of mugwort.”

Bellamy looks down at the one in his hands, like he isn’t sure where to put it. “What does that mean?”

Clarke thinks back to her dream, to Anya’s warning. _Lightning, thunder, rain_.“I have no idea,” she admits.

She finds an old Tupperware container with minimal stains, and they pack the cicadas up as carefully as possible, but they’re so delicate that most of them turn to dust when they pick them up. Bellamy puts the box up on top of the fridge out of sight, while Clarke tosses the dirty pillowcase into the hamper. She knows it won’t help, ignoring the fact that Bellamy took a crown of strange herb-bugs out of his dream, but honestly she just doesn’t have the energy to think about it. _One_ cryptic dream is more than enough for her.

She finds Bellamy in the hallway, studying one of the picture frames on the wall. It’s one of those frames with multiple boxes, that hold six different photographs at once. He’s looking at the top left corner, where a thirteen-year-old Clarke is perched on a river rock, smiling beside her father. They’re each holding a fishing pole, though Clarke remembers that she barely ever used hers at all.

“His name was Jake,” Clarke says, making Bellamy jump, and she has to bite down on her smile. He turns around, sheepish at being caught.

“Was he,” he falters a bit, trying for the right word. “Like you?”

“What, psychic? Sort of, but in a different way. He could fix things, things that normal people couldn’t. He was Oreia too.”

Bellamy turns back to the photo, and Clarke catches the hint of something new in the corners of his eyes. Something wistful. “He looks nice. Happy.”

“We were,” she agrees, clearing the lump in her throat. It isn’t like the one from her dream. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just heavy. “What about your family?” With everything that’s happened, and the bone-deep thought that she _knows_ him, it’s been easy for Clarke to forget that she doesn’t actually know very much _about_ Bellamy Blake. “Besides Octavia. What were your parents like?”

“Parent,” Bellamy corrects, but it isn’t sharp, just factual. He gives half a shrug. “Our mom was, well. She did the best she could, I guess. She worked hard, she was always working, but she was never really a _mom_. Honestly I don’t think she wanted kids at all. She sort of, it always felt like she thought of us like another bill to pay, you know? Rent, electricity, water, kids.”

Clarke frowns. She can’t even imagine what it might be like, to have Bellamy Blake in her life and _not_ want him. “I’m sorry.”

He gives another half shrug, a movement which she’s starting to associate with him. “I’m over it now, but yeah, it kind of sucked growing up. I tried to keep O from the worst of it.”

“It seems like you did. She’s a good kid.”

“Yeah,” he grins, ducking a little, suddenly proud, and she’s glad that he has this, at least. That he had someone, when things were at their worst. That they had each other.

“What about you?” he asks, and Clarke looks up to find he’s stepped away from the wall, closer, watching her face. She could reach out and touch him. “Tell me about Clarke Griffin.”

“You already know everything,” she says, but the words sound hollow. She always feels so empty when she lies to him. She has half a mind to just spill her guts right here and now, all over her hallway floor, just throwing up the truth like vomit and leading him out to the garden to dig up the bones like a dog. “You have a file on me.”

He doesn’t say anything, just reaches out a hand and traps a tangled curl between his fingers, making her voice die in her throat. She doesn’t move and he steps closer, dropping his hand to smooth his knuckles down the slope of her neck, feeling her muscles work as she swallows.

“I don’t care about what’s in the file,” he says. “I want to know about the girl that fell through a deer stand, and cut her thumb open with a knife.” He moves his hand until it’s wrapped around one half of her neck, just resting there, soft and warm, and Clarke forgets how to breathe for a moment. “I want to know everything you haven’t told me, anything you _want_ to tell me.”

It takes her a few tries to speak. “Maybe I like being mysterious,” she tries, and Bellamy grins, leaning in until his mouth finds hers.

Which is of course how Octavia finds them, stumbling in with a sleepy scowl and her hair a towering nest on her head. Corvus is staying at Wells', both because he offered and because Clarke really didn't want the reanimated crow in her house, and Octavia isn't exactly happy about it. She's been sulking.

Bellamy pulls back with a start, and Clarke suddenly remembers that she is _very_ much not dressed.

“I, um, should go get changed,” she offers, and all but trips to get inside her room and shut the door.

She can just barely make out Octavia’s voice, still scratchy but amused, as she teases her brother. _So_ that’s _why you made us stay here instead of Wells’ mansion? So you could make out with your girlfriend?_

Bellamy sounds much less amused. _She’s not my girlfriend_ , he snaps _. Get ready for school._

Clarke can practically feel Octavia raise a brow, which is probably a sign that she’s been spending far too much time with the siblings. _Get ready? For what? Where am I going? It’s an online school, honestly Bell._

The conversation continues, but Clarke steps away from the door, if only because it might seem suspicious if she takes an hour to pull on a pair of jeans and whichever shirt on her floor seems the cleanest. She doubts the Blake’s would appreciate being eavesdropped on.

She considers calling Raven, but what good would it do? Raven knows less about cryptic dream messages than Clarke does. She wouldn’t have any answers for what Anya’s message meant, or Bellamy’s cicadas. And the idea of calling to complain that she’s half in love with the man investigating the disappearance of a person Clarke killed, makes her head hurt.

She shakes the thought away, and finger-combs her hair a little, because if she uses a brush it’ll become frizzy and unbearable. When she was a teenager, she used to pull the front ends back into a little braid. She thought it looked sort of like a crown, and made her look like a princess. It was nice, a daily routine that made her feel normal. She isn’t sure when she stopped, or why, but she hasn’t done it in years.

Clarke sits on the edge of her mattress and does it now, pulling the strands and twining them together without looking, the muscle memory kicking in even after all this time. She isn’t sure why it makes her feel better, and she isn’t going to question it. Some things don’t need to be read into like a code.

She walks out to find the siblings perched on the counters, across the room from each other because there isn’t enough space on either side for both of them. They must have found the cereal cupboard, because they’re eating Captain Crunch out of two very large coffee mugs. Clarke might have forgotten to wash out her bowls. She refuses to feel bad about it; she’s had a lot going on in the last few days, and forgetting to wash her dishes seems understandable.

“Hey Clarke,” Octavia chirps, and Bellamy throws a balled up dish towel at her face, which she dodges easily. “ _What_? I’m being nice!”

Clarke ignores them both and reaches for the cupboard, but Bellamy stops her, pressing his toes into the back of her thigh to get her attention. He nods his head towards a third cereal-filled mug on the counter beside him. “We poured you some.”

She grins and doesn’t really think about it, before stepping up on her toes to press a kiss to his mouth. It’s mostly dry, and chaste, but Octavia makes a show of miming a gag anyway. Bellamy just kisses back.

It’s all rather shockingly domestic.

They leave their bowls out on the counter when they’re finished, because the sink is full, and Bellamy barks at Octavia to go put on some clothes that don’t involve pajamas. She rolls her eyes, and takes her time slowly sliding down from the counter, but eventually she leaves the room.

“So what’s on the supernatural agenda, today?” Bellamy asks, starting to fill the sink with warm, soapy water that smells like lavender and lime.

“I have an appointment in half an hour, and then the rest of the day is free,” she bites at her lip a little, considering. She still isn’t sure what her grandmother meant, in her dream, but she can’t overlook the fact that she’d asked _Rivkah_ for answers just the day before. What had Anya said, again? _Best finish up your canning soon_ . Clarke had never really taken up canning, but she remembers seeing rows and rows and rows of them inside the tree. “I think we should go back to _γιavúla._ ”

Bellamy doesn’t seem too surprised, elbow-deep in suds and dishes. “For any reason in particular?”

“I had a...dream, last night. Of my grandmother. My real one. I think _γιavúla_ might have something to do with it.”

Bellamy shrugs. “Okay. I’ll check in with my boss while you do your thing.” He hesitates and then adds, “I don’t really feel comfortable leaving Octavia by herself, after yesterday.”

“You want to take her with us?”

“I don’t know if I feel comfortable bringing her to some magic old lady tree either,” he says, wry. “I know she’s sixteen, and almost grown up, but--”

“She’s still your little sister,” Clarke finishes. “I get it. I can text Raven, and see if she wants to babysit?”

Bellamy lets out a breath in relief. “That would be great, yeah.”

ME: _you know how you owe me, for letting you crash on my couch?_

Clarke only has to wait a second before Raven responds, because when she actually _has_ a cell phone, Raven likes to text back immediately. Clarke is the opposite, often forgetting about her phone entirely before finally responding after two weeks.

:BIRD EMOJI: _considering_ _the fact that im p much sleeping exclusively at wells these days nah_

ME: _okay. you know how you owe me, for saving your life after you brought a hitman to my house?_

:BIRD EMOJI: _...what do u want_

ME: _can you come over and watch octavia while bellamy and i follow up on a lead?_

:BIRD EMOJI: _u srsly want me to babysit the hot marshalls sister while u go have weird witch sex w the hot marshall in the woods ? ok_

ME: _we’re not going to have sex, we’re going to investigate._

:BIRD EMOJI: _right. investigate THEN weird witch sex in the woods_

ME: _i hate you._

:BIRD EMOJI: _no u dont im getting u laid_

Clarke doesn’t bother replying to the last text, and just trusts that Raven will show up on time.

Maya does, which is to be expected; in the seven months that she’s been Clarke’s customer, she has never once been late. Bellamy and Octavia disappear into the belly of the house to give them some privacy, while Clarke does her best to hastily clear a spot on the table, for Maya’s books.

“Just three today,” she says, almost like she’s sorry, but Clarke just waves a hand.

“The quantity doesn’t matter; it’s the content that tells us what we need to know.”

She has Maya set them out in the pattern that feels most comfortable, and then flip through the pages with her eyes closed, as usual, while Clarke writes down the words.

“Maya,” she frowns down at the first page. “This book isn’t in English.” Clarke glances at the other two, and finds that they aren’t either.

“I know,” Maya says, sounding uncertain. “But, you said to always pick the ones that sort of, _leapt_ out at me, right? These are the only ones that did.”

Clarke hums, but Maya’s right, so they keep going. In the end there are only three words in total, one from each book, and the letters seem foreign and misshapen on the page. Clarke pulls out her phone and brings up google translate. It’s not the best translator, and can be downright wrong at times, but it’s the quickest one she can think of.

The language is unknown to both of them, but they both agree it looks Eastern European, and they try at least twenty different ones before they find it’s Uzbek.

 _“Momaqaldiroq_ ,” Clarke rolls the word across her tongue like a landslide, the letters crashing over one another in a rush. She puts it into the translator and it doesn’t recognize the word, so she says it into the speech app instead. The translation beeps back at her.

 _Thunder_ , her phone’s mechanical voice reads helpfully, and Clarke feels her skin go cold. She looks at the next word, wets her lips, and says it.

 _Lightning_ , her phone says back, and Clarke knows what the third one means before she even reads it. But she says that one, too.

_Rain._

There’s a pause, and then Maya, oblivious, says “What do you think it means?”

“I,” Clarke stops, starts again and then stops again. There are several things that she’s thinking, but she can’t really seem to grasp a single one, to pull it out and get a clearer look at it. “I think it means there’s a storm coming, and you should probably prepare.” She glances back at the books, stacked innocently on the edge of her worn table. The top one’s cover is a photograph that looks like it was taken in the nineteen eighties’, of an old man playing golf. “Maya, why does the library have three books in _Uzbek_?”

“You know, I’m not sure,” Maya admits. “They might be from that new floating book program we have. Where all the libraries in the county pass each other’s books around.”

Clarke isn’t sure why any library in their county would have three books in Uzbek, but she lets the topic die. Maya pays her fee, collects her books, and leaves, and Clarke is left staring down at her phone translator, like it’s a traitor.

“You couldn’t have just said _you’ll meet a tall, dark and handsome stranger_?” she accuses. Her phone’s screen blinks to black.

“You’ll meet a tall, dark and handsome stranger,” Raven repeats dutifully, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. She’s carrying what smells like a cinnamon latte, in one of Wells’ fancy to-go espresso cups, because of course he has fancy to-go espresso cups. Raven fixes Clarke with a heavy look. “What, are you starting a collection? You already have one, staying at your house. Don’t get greedy, Griffin.”

Clarke rolls her eyes and pulls Raven into a lazy half-hug, one arm around her shoulders. She knows she just saw her the night before, but it still feels like it’s been ages since she’s spent any time with her best friend. _Really_ spent time with her. “We should do something soon,” she decides. “Just the two of us.”

Raven blinks at her, surprised. “Okay, sure. Like what? When?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke admits. “Watch a movie, or something. Maybe they’ll have one of those old AMC marathons. Tomorrow night?”

“Sounds good,” Raven agrees, and she actually smiles, bright and happy, and it takes Clarke by surprised. When was the last time she’d seen her _smile_ ? Not smirk, or grin, or chuckle wryly, but actually _smile_? She can’t remember.

The Blake’s choose that moment to come out of hiding. “I can’t believe you guys got me a _babysitter_ ,” Octavia says, but she likes Raven, so there’s no real heat to it.

“Hey, I’m the cool aunt,” Raven argues. “I’ll let you stay up all night and watch HBO.”

Octavia perks up at that. “Do you like _True Blood_?”

Raven squints, trying to place the name. “That’s the _Twilight_ one, but with sex, right?”

Bellamy aims at both of them with a stern finger. “Homework first, _then_ sexy vampires,” he orders, and Clarke follows him out the door.

They take his Jeep again, because Bellamy gets re-indorsed for gas expenses, and because Clarke’s truck still sounds like a dying woodland creature whenever the engine turns on.

“It’s still in the same place, right?” he asks, turning down the mountain path. “It doesn’t, like, _move around_ , or anything?”

Clarke eyes him a little, unsure if he’s serious. “How exactly do you think magic works?”

“If I knew how it worked, I wouldn’t need you as my sidekick.”

Clarke bristles immediately, even as he grins. “I’m not your _sidekick_ ,” she says, affronted. “I’m no one’s _sidekick_.”

“I’m the one with the badge,” Bellamy points out. “And the gun.”

“And I’m the one that can turn you into a toad as you sleep,” she says, not missing a beat, and Bellamy stares at her.

“Alright,” he decides, turning his focus back to the road. The trees fall away on either side of them, blurs of gold and brown and just a little green. Anya was right; summer is ending, soon. “Partners?”

Clarke settles back in her seat, running the word over in her head, liking the way it feels. It feels like when she’s piecing something together, and it finally slots into place. “Partners.”

Bellamy parks where they parked the day before, and waits for her to round the hood of the car, before holding out his hand. She knots her fingers through his, and they start hiking.

The tree is right where it was, and Clarke elbows him in the side when they reach it. “Surprised it isn’t facing the other direction?” she teases. “Were you expecting it to be wearing a housecoat, this time?”

“No,” he makes a face. “But there aren’t as many cats as I thought there would be,” he admits, and Clarke laughs so hard she has to stop, and double over.

Inside _γιavúla_ is just as unchanged as the outside, and Bellamy keeps hold of her hand until they reach the hard-packed earth that makes up its floor. She crosses over to the shelf that seems to have the biggest congregation of cans--old metal tin ones filled with dried flowers turned to dust; glass mason jars filled with jelly and crow’s feet and the shrunken heads of little wild pigs; unopened cream of wheat that someone carved the side of with a knife, to spell out the Mountain Daughters crest. Clarke looks at them all, turns them over in her hands until her skin is stained with decades’ worth of pollen and cobwebs and soot.

“What are we looking for?” Bellamy asks, picking up a can, reading the label, crinkled and yellow with age.

“Anything that seems out of the ordinary.”

“We’re inside a giant, wish-granting grandma tree,” Bellamy grumbles, and Clarke sighs because. Well he’s right, isn’t he? It’s not as if even she knows what she’s looking for. For all she knows, they could be in the wrong place. Maybe Anya meant her own store of old cans, back in the root cellar of the house. Maybe she meant Clarke should take up canning herself, or go grocery shopping. Maybe the line about canning hadn’t meant anything at all.

She’s about to just give up on the idea, when she sees it, tucked into the corner of a top shelf, behind a moth-eaten bunny-shaped doll. It’s a mason jar of thick cloudy glass, like so many others, but there’s an emerald ribbon tied around the rim. It’s coated thickly in dust, but Clarke swipes her thumb against the silk, and she’s so _sure_. It’s the ribbon from her dream. The one that was her fortune.

Clarke isn’t sure what the consequences are, of taking an offering out of _γιavúla_ , especially one that she didn’t put there. So she presses her nose up to the glass, to try and see inside, but a combination of age and grime have made that impossible.

“Here,” Bellamy takes it from her hands and taps the rim firmly against the wooden shelf three times. Then he puts his palm over the cover, clenches, and twists, grimacing from the effort. With a _pop_ , the lid releases, and he opens up the jar.

“It’s empty,” Clarke says, not really sure what to make of it. What kind of offering is a hollow jar? She takes it from his hand, and then takes the lid, and studies them both.

The lid is a cheap metal, but when she wipes at the yellow-green filth covering the sheen, she sees something is painted across the top. Clarke takes the hem of her shirt and uses it to clean away the rest of the grime, and then holds it up to the sunlight filtering in through the open door, and the holes in the labyrinth of roots up above them. The paint is as old as the rest of the jar, but has somehow managed to stay perfectly intact, so the symbol is clear.

It’s an infinity sign.

Clarke looks at the jar itself next, and finds it identical to so many other Vaseline glass things in Mount Weather. The logo for the company that made it is embossed in its side, and Clarke runs her fingers over the textured letters spelling out the name. There’s an infinity sign there too, and she can’t believe she didn’t recognize it earlier. It’s a corporate logo, an image that everyone around here knows.

“I know where we should go,” she says, rushing to twist the lid back on, ribbon and all, and put the jar back in its place, before tugging Bellamy up the stairs with her dirt-stained hand.

“O-kay,” he drawls, slowing them down so that she doesn’t slip on the smooth needles. They have to dig their heels in with each step, so they don’t fall. “Care to share that information with me?”

“There’s an abandoned warehouse on what used to be Main Street,” she explains, feeling a rush of adrenaline start to buzz at her fingertips. They have a _lead_ , they’re finally, finally _getting somewhere_. “Now it’s mostly just a hookup spot for teenagers, but back in the day they used to make things there. Furniture, mostly, but glass, too. Canning jars, and coke bottles.”

“What does that have to do with the case?”

“I don’t know yet,” Clarke admits. “But it does, trust me.”

Bellamy squeezes her hand as they reach the car. She has to let go of him. “Okay,” he says. “I trust you. Tell me where to drive.”

Clarke isn’t really sure how to explain what it feels like, to know Bellamy Blake trusts her implicitly. Mostly it feels like when she’s climbing a staircase and expecting there to be one last step, and there isn’t, so her foot falls through the air and for a moment she can’t breathe, certain that she’s going to fall--except then suddenly there _is_ one last step, and she finds it, and she can breathe again.

There’s a rush of warmth moving through her and she takes the time to watch his profile as he drives. He’s busy keeping watch for deer and street signs, and doesn’t notice her gaze, and Clarke takes in the curls of his hair, the line of his cheeks, his freckles. She thinks _if I woke up tomorrow and you weren’t here, I wouldn’t know what to do_.

And then with a jolt it comes back to her, how he _shouldn’t_ trust her. How much she’s kept from him, hidden from him, _lied_ about to him. The body buried in her backyard. The body that climbed out of her backyard. The poison that she can wear like armor, making her lethal to the touch.

She wishes she could tell him everything. She wishes he could just _know_ , the way he just _knows_ so much else about her. She wants to find him in their dream world and waste away together, on grass that feels like feathers.

“Left or right?” Bellamy asks, pulling Clarke out of her thoughts so forcefully that she jumps. He glances over with a raised brow.

“Uh, right. Go right.”

He does, and she directs him through the next few turns until they’re rolling down a stretch of asphalt, along what was once the busiest street in the county, before the population increased and the town was forced to grow with it.

Tondc Manufacturing looks just as Clarke remembers it. Old, mostly. Decaying in a strange way, from the inside out. There are a handful of windows along the front wall, all smashed, and Clarke leads him to the heavy weighted door around the side that all the kids used to use, to get in. At first glance, it looks like it’s shut, and boarded up. But Clarke reaches for the handle and twists, dislodging a little rock that was placed in the lock mechanism, keeping the door wedged open just an inch. She pulls and it yawns open, with the sound of bone scraping bone, like a dislocated joint.

Bellamy gives her a look. “You didn’t say we’d be breaking and entering.”

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says brightly. “Did you want to wait for a warrant to get into the local bang base?”

Bellamy chokes a little on nothing. “ _Bang base_?” He shakes his head when she opens her mouth. “Actually, no, never mind. Let’s just get this over with.”

He pulls out a miniature Mag Lite and shines it into the warehouse, spread out for them like a gaping mouth. It’s mostly empty, a few shreds of cardboard boxes here and there, some crumpled Coors cans and murky bottles littering the floor, an old dilapidated floral couch someone probably stole from the town dump and dragged in there, a handful of spray paint canisters and some unoriginal pentagrams and dicks peppering the walls.

There are holes in every wall, and the ceiling--either from age and water damage or fists and boots, or both. There are crumbling cement columns that used to hold up the building but do little to nothing now, wasting away with the rest of it.

But the thing that catches most of their attention, the thing that has had the attention of every kid in Mount Weather for years, is the Tenonator.

“What is that,” Bellamy breathes, running the beam of his flashlight over the machine. It’s enormous and heavy looking, made of thick metal that used to be painted blue but is now just a flaking, musty gray. There are gears and knobs and other normal machinery bits that are to be expected, but there are also a dozen wheels that look like they go nowhere, levers that defy gravity, and hoses springing every which way from every angle, spreading out and up through the ceiling in a jigsaw like _γιavúla_ ’s branches.

“We call it the Tenonator,” Clarke says, reaching out to brush her fingers over the engraved letters, thick and clunky on the metal side. “No one knows what it used to be for. It’s the only machine they left behind, when this place closed down.”

She remembers when she was just fourteen or fifteen, she and Raven and Wells and a handful of other kids from their school would spend their afternoons in the warehouse. There were spring box mattresses down there, back then, and sometimes they’d use them to make out, or pass out after smoking weed out of apples that they carved into pipes with Bic pens. Clarke remembers being enamored with the Tenonator back then, with the secrets that it held in its metal pipes, with the mystery of it. It reminded her so much of _Rivkah_ and sometimes she’d try to talk to it, like she talked to the grandmother tree. It never talked back.

“Okay so what do we do,” Bellamy asks, clearly out of his element. Clarke isn’t sure he’s really been _in_ his element since he showed up in town. “Leave an offering, like with _Rivkah_?”

Clarke shrugs. “We can try, I guess. Nothing I ever did as a kid seemed to work.”

“What did you do?”

“Tried talking to it,” she says. “I used to tell it about my day, about what was going on in my life, about the weather. I don’t know--kid stuff.” When she looks over, Bellamy’s smiling at the machine, but she’s pretty sure it’s for her.

“I used to talk to the Roman Gods,” he admits. “Or the Greek ones, sometimes. I wasn’t really picky. I thought they lived in the planets, so I’d go lay outside and stare up at the sky and talk to them.”

Clarke grins. “That’s adorable.”

“You used to talk to a _machine_.”

She shrugs, running her hand over metal ridges that look like square teeth. “I was adorable, too.”

Clarke runs her eyes over the Tenonator, wondering if it can hear them. She can feel a slight warmth resting inside it, like the heart of a radiator that hasn’t been turned on in too long. She knows that it means _something_ is there, something like life. She wonders if it can understand them at all, if they ask for its help. She wonders if its ever helped anyone, before.

She wonders if it’s ever been asked.

Clarke lays her palm against the side, underneath its name, and closes her eyes. _Tenonator_ , she thinks, because it seems proper to address it. _Please, if you have any answers to our questions, please let us know. Do you know where Tristan Woods is? Do you know who he’s working for? Please help us find him._

She has a million other questions that she could ask, but it feels a little impolite to push them all onto the Tenonator’s shoulders. When she opens her eyes, she finds Bellamy has closed his as well, hand spread warm and flat on the machine’s other side.

“What did you ask?” she wonders, when he’s finished. Clarke unbraids her hair and leaves the little crown-shaped barrette, as payment. Bellamy leaves a pen.

“I asked it about my dreams,” he says, leading their way back outside, squinting as the sudden burst of sunlight blinds them. “I asked it what I am.”

“You’re Bellamy Blake,” Clarke says, firm, leaving no room for argument. “You’re a US Marshall, and an older brother, and,” she falters a bit, and he gives a small smile.

“Yeah, that’s where I’m left hanging, too.”

Wells’ car is sitting in Clarke’s drive when they pull up, and Bellamy has to park alongside it. He shakes his head as he steps out, and they make their way to her porch.

“I can’t believe I’m asking giant trees and machines to do my job,” he says, and Clarke has to laugh.

“Technically we just asked them for _help_ ,” Clarke points out. “You’re still doing the heavy lifting.”

“ _We’re_ still doing the heavy lifting,” Bellamy corrects, holding the door open with a smirk. “Partners, remember?”

Clarke tries to bite back her grin. “Partners,” she agrees.

Inside, her kitchen is a disaster.

“Don’t freak out,” Raven orders, as Clarke gapes at the mess. “We may have overestimated the range of an egg beater,” she admits, and Clarke’s brain fumbles for words.

“What did you do?” she asks, finally, “Set off a _nuclear bomb_?”

“Don’t be over dramatic,” Raven says, which seems very unfair. Every inch of the room is covered in some sort of unknown, sticky-looking substance. Clarke feels like she very much has the right to be every level of dramatic about it. “We made brownies.”

“Brownies,” Clarke repeats dumbly, even as Raven snatches a plate of them from the table, and holds it out for her to inspect. They do look very brownie-like, which is a little surprising, considering how truly awful Raven is in the kitchen.

“Octavia and Wells helped,” Raven admits, as if reading her mind, and Clarke nods. That makes more sense. She takes two from the pile, and hands one over to Bellamy.

They follow Raven through the house, out to the screened-in back porch, where Octavia and Wells are lounging on the wicker furniture like a pair of lazy house cats. A second plate sits on the table between them, empty of everything but a few crumbs, and a third half-filled plate rests beside that.

“How many did you make?” Clarke asks, amused, as Raven sets the third down so that the plates form a sort of triangle. She’s finished her first brownie, and reaches for a second one without hesitation. She hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and these are quite possibly the best brownies she’s ever had in her life.

“We had to triple the recipe,” Wells says, and Clarke starts in on her third. Beside her, Bellamy wolfs down the last of the second plate, barely pausing to breathe between bites.

Clarke doesn’t notice the strange aftertaste until her fourth brownie is almost done, and she frowns down at it in question. She has to focus a little harder than she should, to see it clearly, and frowns even more when she does. “Why is my brownie green? Did you put vegetables in these? Wells did you trick me into eating vegetables?”

Raven and Octavia start to giggle, which is never a good sign, and when Clarke glances up, she sees Wells looking sheepish. Outside, the sky is turning orange with the sunset. When did that happen? It was only noon, just ten minutes ago. Her leg feels unbearably itchy, like when Clarke took in a stray tabby cat for exactly three days and it gave her fleas before ultimately leaving. She bends down to scratch it, having to maneuver herself oddly, so she doesn’t drop the brownie in her hand.

“No veggies, but he did trick you into eating herbs,” Raven says slyly, and Clarke whirls on her.

“You made _pot_ brownies?” she demands, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Bellamy stare at his half-eaten--what is it, sixth? seventh?--brownie in horror. He’s a _police officer_ . Well, not a police officer, but he _does_ have a badge, which means, what exactly? Will anyone know? How long has Clarke been scratching her leg? It seems like it’s been a while. She pulls her hand away and sees that she broke skin, leaving angry red lines down her shin.

“Don’t be mad,” Raven says, reaching over to pat Clarke’s knee softly. “You just seem so _tense_ lately. We all just seem so _tense_.”

She takes her brownie and presses it to Clarke’s, like the brownies are glasses of champagne, and they’re toasting.

“Where did you even get pot?” Clarke wonders, a little impressed in spite of herself. She hasn’t gotten high since Raven left town, after high school.

“We found it,” Octavia says helpfully, and Bellamy levels her with a firm parental glare. Octavia scrunches her nose at him.

“Found it where?”

“In a box,” Raven sing-songs. “In a box, on a fridge, in a room--”

Clarke meets Bellamy’s eye from where they’ve flopped on opposite ends of the loveseat. They both had to bend their legs a little, to fit, and Clarke’s feet have ended up pillowed on Bellamy’s thigh, but he doesn’t seem to mind, holding them in place by her ankles.

“The mugwort,” she says, stumbling to her feet to go check, even though she knows what she’ll find. “We’re eating the cicadas, from you dream,” she tells him.

Clarke tries to remember what she knows about mugwort, but her brain is filled with fog and snow slush. It feels like she’s trying to walk against the current, and she doesn’t actually know much about the herb to begin with. She knows it smells like marijuana to some people, that it can get you high in certain doses, that it’s supposed to be good for clearing the mind to allow second sight.

She isn’t sure how long it takes her, to make it to the kitchen. She keeps having to stop, to scratch her leg, and she knows it’s a torn open, bleeding mess now. She can feel it dripping down onto the floor as she walks. She accidentally puts her hand in a puddle of egg yolk, on the counter, as she looks up onto the fridge. It’s empty, like she knew it would be, and when she glances around she sees the Tupperware container, sitting open on the stove.

“What have you done,” she asks the box, glaring when it doesn’t answer.

Outside, the wind chimes dangling from her porch roof sing to her. They want her to come outside, to hear them.

“Alright,” Clarke decides. “But only because my ears seem to be off right now.”

Outside, the sun has sunk almost completely beyond the horizon, and everything is Clarke’s favorite shade of dusty purple, the kind that comes just before dark. There are cicadas in the trees around her, real ones, and she rubs her stomach, where the dream cicadas sit.

“I didn’t mean to eat you,” she tells them, and starts off towards the trees, so she can let the real cicadas know, too.

The first tree she stumbles up to, right on the edge where her garden becomes a part of the mountain woods, is a white ash that she doesn’t recognize.

“You’re new,” she tells it, and pats its trunk reassuringly. She doesn’t mind a new tree, every now and again. When she pulls her hand back, she sees she’s left a smudge of rust-colored blood staining the wood. Without really thinking about it, she raises a finger and draws the pattern she’s so familiar with, by now, large and orange-red across the pale grain.

Clarke stares at the symbol for a moment like she always does, wondering if she’ll ever know how to say it out loud, or if the name will stay forgotten forever.

She’s watching it so hard that she nearly doesn’t notice when the tree itself starts to move.

The trunk splits itself open like a seam, like a zipper being pulled from the inside, and a man steps out of the tree. Clarke lets out a gasp, stepping back so quickly that she loses her footing and trips over the gnarled roots poking up through the earth. She lets out a scream as she falls, and hits her head on the ground, hard enough to blur her vision.

She’s still dazed, eyes rolling around like loose marbles, as the man leans down over her, close enough for her to squint and make out, by the last of the day’s light.

“Lincoln?”


	7. I've Never Fallen From Quite This High

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy waits until Lincoln is outside, throwing away the their sandwich wrappers and styrofoam cups, before turning to Clarke. “Do you really think Luna will help us?”
> 
> Clarke hums, sipping at the last of her milkshake. Bellamy hands her the maraschino cherry from his without a word. “I don’t know,” she admits. She doesn’t know Luna, but she does know Lincoln, and it isn’t like they have a better lead. “But Lincoln does, and I trust him.”
> 
> Bellamy nods. “And I trust you. Luna it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we'rebackbitches.gif

When Clarke was a young girl, her grandmother took her to a party in a neighboring town, to meet distant cousins and great-aunts whom Clarke had never seen before. It was the last day of summer, and they were celebrating.

There were a handful of other children around, but most of the Oreia there were women. Anya went to go join them in the incense burning, and brought Clarke over to a boy who looked several years older than her.

"Clarke, this is your cousin Lincoln," she told her. "He's going to show you around."

Lincoln was nice enough, quiet and a little shy, and diligently took Clarke all around the outside of the house, pointing out the hydrangea bushes and the whippoorwills in the trees, and showing her the ring of mushrooms that they weren't allowed to touch. Then he brought her to the fire pit dug into the middle of the backyard, and they sat down to watch the flames. He said he was trying to learn how to read them, the way his father read storms and lightning and other harsh things. Clarke wanted to learn how to read fire too, but no matter how hard she stared, she just couldn't get the hang of it.

At sunset, the Oreia all joined hands and said a prayer, and then took burning sticks of incense like sparklers on the Fourth of July. Lincoln and Clarke swirled theirs around, writing letters in the air with the smoke, until they burned down completely leaving their fingers smudged with sweet-smelling ash. 

She spent the night at the house with her grandmother, tucked into a knitted blanket on the lawn beneath the stars, with all the other Oreia. They left to go home around dawn, with Clarke falling asleep in the back of the car as the sun rose over the mountains. 

She saw Lincoln a few more times throughout her life, always sparingly. He came to Anya’s funeral, and her father’s. They met up at their cousin’s wedding, but Clarke hasn’t seen him in years. Until now.

Clarke sets the freshly made pot of tea in the middle of the table, along with the mismatched cups she’d fetched from the cupboard. The kitchen was still a mess, in the process of being cleaned by a haggard-looking Octavia, Raven and Wells. Clarke had led Bellamy and Lincoln outside, to Anya’s old metal garden table.

It’s still early, just after sunup, and Clarke is feeling more awake than she’s ever been in the morning. She and Lincoln had stayed up half through the night, talking about everything except the obvious. What he was doing in Mount Weather, and specifically, why he’d been hiding inside one of her trees. 

Instead, they focused on catching each other up on their respective families. He asked after her mother, and she asked about his aunt, the one who took him in after his parents’ deaths. Both are apparently fine.

“I paid my respects to  _ Rivkah _ when I got to town,” Lincoln said, and that was what eventually opened the gate between them. They may not have been very  _ close _ growing up, but they were family. They were Oreia, and Clarke needed all the help she could get these days. 

By the time they went inside, it was well past midnight and Clarke found the others had fallen asleep in the porch, so she tucked Lincoln into the couch bed and they agreed to discuss it in the morning.

Clarke fell asleep and found Bellamy waiting for her in their meadow. She sat down beside him and he took her hand in his. 

Now, she watches as the real Bellamy stifles a yawn and spoons sugar into his tea. Apparently while he has no trouble drinking black coffee, he likes his tea sweet. His hair is a disaster, from sleeping in the loveseat, and his uniform shirt is wrinkled beyond despair, and Clarke finds herself smiling hopelessly whenever she looks at him.

Lincoln takes his tea with fresh mint from Clarke’s garden, and Bellamy makes a face as he watches. He doesn’t like tea, but he doesn’t want to say anything, or ask for coffee, and Clarke bites back on a laugh. She wishes she didn’t find it as endearing as she does.

“So,” Bellamy clears his throat, still rough from sleep. “You two are--cousins?”

Clarke and Lincoln share an amused glance over their respective cups. Bellamy is the first human they’ve ever spoken to who knew the truth about what they are, and it’s cute how he’s trying to seem cavalier about it. He doesn’t want to be rude.

“His aunt and my grandmother were half-sisters,” Clarke confirms. “Most Oreia from the same area are related somehow or another.” Bellamy’s eyebrows rise, and Clarke remembers that the only other Oreia he’s met has been her ex-girlfriend. “Not all of us, though.”

“Clarke says you are investigating something,” Lincoln says, steering the conversation back on track. Lincoln has always been good at getting to the point. 

“Yeah,” Bellamy grimaces as he takes another sip of his tea, and suddenly everything is back to business. He tells Lincoln about Tristan and everything he knows about the case, while Clarke stays silent and miserable across the table. She doesn’t try to offer any information of her own, both because she’s not supposed to know anything that Bellamy doesn’t, and because she’s worried that if she opens her mouth, she’ll spill everything. It’s been one thing to lie to Bellamy, a US Marshal investigating the disappearance of the man Clarke killed; it’s a completely different thing to lie to her cousin, a fellow Oreia. 

As difficult as it’s been, keeping secrets from Bellamy, Clarke has always managed to at least excuse it. It was to keep the Oreia safe, and to protect Raven, and maybe a little bit to protect herself. But she has no understandable reason to keep things from  _ Lincoln _ , and the thought makes her skin feel like it’s too small for her body, uncomfortable and tight.

“What about you, Clarke?” Bellamy asks, and Clarke’s head snaps up so quickly that she pinches a nerve and winces, rubbing at the back of her neck.

“Sorry?”

Bellamy smiles, all fondness, and she hates how warm the sight makes her.  _ He shouldn’t look at me like that. I’m a liar. I’m a  _ murderer. 

“I asked if you have anything you want to add,” he repeats, and she shakes her head, turning back to her cousin.

“How long are you staying in Mount Weather?”

Lincoln finishes his tea and pops an extra mint leaf in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “I’m actually here for your help,” he says. “You remember the  _ Lysaire _ ?” 

Lincoln was the first to ever tell Clarke about the  _ Lysaire _ \--a hushed ghost story over the fire when they were kids. Clarke remembers the way her cousins’ eyes all lit up at the sound of the word, at the idea of it. Every Oreia grows up hearing about the ancient book, all the history and magic of their people written in its pages.

“What about it?” Clarke asks, thoughts blinking back to her conversation with Lexa, but of course she already knows what he’s going to say. 

“It’s real. And someone’s looking for it.”

“Let me guess,” Clarke interrupts. “It’s an Oreia like no one has ever seen before, and she’s collecting others.”

If Lincoln is surprised that she’s heard of the new Oreia, he shows no sign. “Her name is Alie. She’s dangerous, Clarke.”

So far, Bellamy has been content to just sip at his tea and listen in silence, but now he decides to cut in. “Who is she, and how is she dangerous? What does she want with the-- _ Lysaire _ ? What  _ is _ the  _ Lysaire _ ?”

“It’s a book,” Lincoln explains. “Or, a record. Of our history, and our people. It was supposedly destroyed centuries ago, but recently it turned up and was stolen.” He glances at Clarke, just for a moment, and she keeps her face carefully blank. “Now Alie is searching for it, gathering more and more Oreia for the cause.” He hesitates, eyes closing for just a breath, looking pained. “She kills the ones who refuse to join.”

Clarke lets out a noise without meaning to, and Bellamy looks like he wants to reach over for her. He doesn’t understand why she feels like her insides are sinking in on themselves. Lincoln catches her eye and she sees her own thoughts reflected in them; disgust and shock and heartbreak. 

“Oreia aren’t supposed to kill each other,” she says, but as an explanation it feels shallow. This isn’t as simple as  _ murder _ . After all, hasn’t she killed another Oreia, herself?

_ That was different _ , she thinks.  _ It was self-defense. Him or me.  _ But for an Oreia to slaughter others of their kind, simply for disagreeing--it’s unheard of. It feels  _ wrong _ , like going against nature. 

“Neither are humans,” Bellamy says gently, but Clarke shakes her head. 

“It isn’t the same. There are so few of us left, it shouldn’t even be  _ considered _ . I’ve never even heard of it happening.” She looks to Lincoln, and he nods.

“Me neither, not since before I was born.”

“Okay, so she’s a bad apple,” Bellamy shrugs. “What does that have to do with Tristan Wilder?”

Lincoln looks at Clarke for what feels like a long moment, stretched and awkward, so she’s sure Bellamy will notice. But he doesn’t say anything, and neither does she, and finally Lincoln blinks away. “I think he was working for her.”

Octavia chooses that moment to stick her head out the screen door, looking grumpy and wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves she must have found under Clarke’s sink, with soapy water dripping off. “Do we have to clean  _ all day _ or is our prison sentence over?”

“You’re the ones that chose to trash Clarke’s kitchen,” Bellamy shoots back. “And I haven’t forgotten that you made  _ pot brownies _ , and tricked me into eating some.”

She heaves an enormous sigh. “Technically it was  _ Raven’s _ idea.”

Raven’s voice leaks out from inside. “Traitor!” 

“You’re stuck cleaning until Clarke’s kitchen is spotless,” Bellamy says, firm.

“But it was a mess before we even did anything!”

Clarke feels a spark of indignance, even though she knows it’s true. “Hey!” The siblings ignore her.

Bellamy crosses his arms over his chest, leveling his sister with a heavy look. “Did I stutter?”

Octavia makes a face at him but disappears back inside without another word. Bellamy lets out a sigh of his own and glances back at Lincoln, looking sheepish. “Sorry. She can be a brat, sometimes.”

“I don’t mind,” Lincoln smiles, and Clarke knows he’s thinking what she thinks, whenever she sees the Blakes bicker. About how he never had a sibling, but always sort of wanted one in that wistful way that most only children do. The idea of someone to share everything with, to grow up with experiencing all the same things and understanding each other the way that only siblings do, has always been appealing. 

Lincoln goes inside to take a shower, after Clarke fetches him a towel and shows him how the faucets work. She walks back out to find Bellamy waiting for her in the hallway. 

Gone is the sleepy-bashful Bellamy from that morning. He’s looking stern now, arms crossed and shoulders tense, like he’s preparing for an argument. Clarke freezes, unsure how to react.

“I’m not an idiot, Clarke,” he says, and Clarke’s first panicked thought is  _ he knows.  _

She swallows it down, and speaks carefully. “I know that.”

“So then why are you lying?”

Clarke wets her lips. This is the moment, she realizes. Either she cracks now, and tells him everything, or she’ll never be able to explain why she didn’t, if he figures it out. Her mouth is open, truth poised and ready on her tongue, but he cuts her off.

“I know Tristan Wilder was after you.”

Clarke’s mouth shuts with a snap and she blinks at him. “You do?”

Bellamy scoffs, like it’s obvious. “An Oreia hitman, working for another Oreia who’s trying to collect more of your kind, shows up in Mount Weather for no reason? It isn’t hard to work out. You’re the only other one around here. Alie wanted you for her cause, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer, so she sent some persuasion.”

Clarke has to admit, it’s a very plausible theory. If she didn’t know the truth herself, she’d certainly believe it. Bellamy Blake is good at his job, he just doesn’t have all the facts that he thinks he does. 

She must have stayed quiet for too long, because suddenly all the fight goes out of him, and his voice turns soft. “Self defense isn’t murder, Clarke.” 

Even if he has the story wrong, it’s still exactly what she’s needed to hear for so long, and Clarke isn’t sure what her face is doing but it’s enough for Bellamy to cross over and wrap her up in his arms. 

“We’ll figure it out,” he promises, and she sniffs into his shoulder, too overwhelmed to care that she’s getting snot and all sorts of other bodily fluids on his uniform. It’s just--this whole time, even when he was by her side she still felt like she was on her own, really. And he still doesn’t know the whole truth, but he’s somehow saying all the right things anyway. “Together.”

Clarke pulls away to look up at him, and finds him smiling reassuringly. “Together?”

He runs a hand up her spine and back down again, in comfort. “Yeah. We’re partners, remember?”

Clarke leans up all at once and kisses him a little harder than she probably should, making him stumble back before he catches himself and kisses back. He tastes like salt, or maybe she does, and he’s warm and wet and real like he never is in their dreams. And she likes their dreams, she does, but this is so much  _ better _ . Having him under her hands, and her mouth, skin to skin.

Someone clears their throat and they pull apart to find Lincoln standing in the doorway, towel wrapped around his waist. His arms and chest are layered in tattoos that weren’t there the last time Clarke saw him, thick black ink looped in circles and lines that she pointedly doesn’t read between.

He shoots her a knowing smirk which she ignores. She refuses to be embarrassed.

“Do you need to borrow some clothes, or did you want to wear a tree all day?” Clarke asks pointedly.

Lincoln grins. “Clothes, please. For today.”

Clarke has a few things left behind by her father, and though he wasn’t nearly as tall or as broad as Lincoln, she thinks he’ll make due. She leaves him to dress in her bedroom, and finds Bellamy fiddling with the coffee machine. Clarke can’t remember the last time her kitchen has been this clean, and she knows it’s mostly because of Wells. He and Raven left late that morning, and Octavia had demanded to visit Corvus and make sure he was still alive.

Well, undead. 

Bellamy is wrestling with the paper filter, refusing to meet her eyes, and they should probably talk about this  _ thing _ between them. They’ve shared dream orgasms and they’ve made out in real life multiple times now; Clarke isn’t sure what the relationship statutes for that type of thing are, but she knows they’ve surpassed  _ two people working on a case together _ . 

Clarke’s the kind of person who  _ likes _ labels. She likes knowing what she is to other people. And, after everything is said and done and Bellamy decides the Wilder case is finished, she’d really like to keep him.

She’s pretty sure he wants to keep her too.

Lincoln comes out just as Bellamy manages to get the machine working for him. Jake’s pants are basically capris on her cousin, but he somehow makes the look work.

“I think we should visit my friend Luna,” he announces, and Bellamy swears when he burns himself with hot water.

“Luna?” Clarke asks, passing him a paper towel. 

“She’s Oreia too, and she knows more about the  _ Lysaire _ than I do. I think she could help.”

Bellamy shrugs. “I had no other plans.”

“She lives a few hours’ drive from here,” Lincoln says, and writes down the address for Bellamy to go punch into his GPS, leaving the cousins alone in Clarke’s kitchen.

Clarke tries to ignore the heat of Lincoln’s stare, but she can’t. “What?”

“How much does he know?”

She looks at her feet, at the last remnants of blue polish on her toenails, from earlier that summer, long before Bellamy waltzed into her life. It seems like a lifetime ago. “Enough.” It isn’t an answer, not really, but Lincoln doesn’t push.

“Be careful, cousin.” He goes out to the car, while Clarke finds her sneakers. She almost wishes he would have scolded her instead, for telling a human so much about their kind. Or told her to cut Bellamy out completely, like Lexa did. Somehow, his apprehensive acceptance sits even heavier on her chest, like an omen.

But anything can feel like an omen if you look hard enough, and Clarke refuses to regret Bellamy.

She’ll regret everything else, but not him.

Lincoln has opted to sit in the backseat, giving Clarke shotgun, and she’d assume it was out of kindness but she knows he just probably doesn’t want to help navigate. She props her feet up on the dashboard, grinning when Bellamy gives her a  _ look _ , as if the car floor isn’t littered with empty coffee cups and old gas station receipts. A few scuff marks won’t do much. 

“I’m adding to the aesthetic,” she tells him. “Garbage-chic.” 

Bellamy snorts, but he doesn’t swat her feet down. “Keep telling yourself.”

They drive for just under five hours, because Bellamy’s GPS wants to take them the scenic route which involves a lot of forest trails and unpaved back roads, and it keeps losing the satellite signal as the mountain farms roll past them.

He has to pull over eventually, when they lose the signal for good, and has Clarke pull out an old folded road map from the glove box.

“Are you  _ actually _ an old man?” she asks, eyeing the ancient GPS and the map, both of which look like they might be from the nineties. Even Bellamy’s phone is an old smartphone. She’s not convinced he’d know what to do with an ipad. 

Bellamy makes a face at her, and takes the well-worn map, unfolding and tracing the lines like he can somehow figure out where they are. 

To Clarke’s surprise, he does. 

“Just make tell me when we reach this exit,” he says, pointing it out before starting the Jeep up again. 

“How did you do that?” Clarke frowns down at the heavy paper in her hands. She can read a lot of things, but old school road maps aren’t one of them.

Bellamy smirks. “I was an eagle scout.” She doesn’t believe him for a second.

The ride is mostly just a straight line after that, through the last of the mountains and then the flatlands towards the sand dunes on the east side of the state. Clarke leans her head against the glass and it doesn’t feel like their last trip did, heavy and anxious with the thought of seeing Lexa and finding answers. It helps that she doesn’t know anything about Luna or where they’re headed, and it helps that Lincoln is in the backseat, so it isn’t just her and Bellamy and the tension between them like glass, ready to break.

They drive deep into the afternoon, stopping only a handful of times for bathroom breaks at highway rest stops, and to refill the gas tank. They eat lunch at a drive-thru, stomachs filled with grease and salt and caramel milkshakes that make their hands sticky.

Bellamy waits until Lincoln is outside, throwing away the their sandwich wrappers and styrofoam cups, before turning to Clarke. “Do you really think Luna will help us?”

Clarke hums, sipping at the last of her milkshake. Bellamy hands her the maraschino cherry from his without a word. “I don’t know,” she admits. She doesn’t know Luna, but she does know Lincoln, and it isn’t like they have a better lead. “But Lincoln does, and I trust him.”

Bellamy nods. “And I trust you. Luna it is.”

Lincoln slides into the car just as the GPS finds its connection again, and they start off on the last stretch of the trip.

The GPS brings them to a fishing pier that’s closed for the season, and Bellamy pulls into an empty gravel parking lot, staring out at the sea. There isn’t anything for miles, except the pier itself and a solitary lighthouse sitting out in the water. 

“This is it?” he asks, skeptical, but he and Clarke follow as Lincoln steps out of the car.

“This is it,” Lincoln confirms, and heads out towards the nearest dock, wood stained dark from the high tide. 

There’s a small park some feet away, lined with a few thin knobby trees and some picnic tables, and Clarke thinks she might not mind coming back to visit when the place is open.

Bellamy looks like he’s about to say something, probably asking where, exactly, Luna is, when Clarke hears a sound like splitting wood, and turns back towards the park.

“Jesus Fuck,” Bellamy says, watching wide-eyed as the trees split open, and six people step out.

They waste no time in crossing over, and Clarke can’t help taking an immediate step back. She’s seen a lot of Oreia in her time, but most of them have been related to her in some sort of way, and none of them have ever looked like  _ this _ . Otherworldly, and inhuman. Their skin is iridescent, like the shells washed up on a beach, and they walk like the ground is rolling underneath them. 

Bellamy steps in front of her, just a little, like he’s trying to shield her. It’s sweet, but unnecessary; no matter how strange they look to her, she knows she’s safe. They’re Oreia.

“We’re friends of Luna,” Lincoln says, speaking with the kind of authority that says he’s been here before.

The Oreia closest to them opens their mouth, and words fall out like rain. “We know who you are,” they say, and holds both hands out. Three small bottles made of sea glass sit on their palms. “Drink.”

“What is it?” Bellamy asks, suspicious, even as he inspects the first bottle. 

Clarke takes hers and sniffs it, but there is no smell. The liquid inside is clear, like water.

“Drink,” the Oreia repeats. “If you wish to see Luna.”

Lincoln offers them both a relatively reassuring smile, before downing his like a shot. Clarke follows after; Lincoln wouldn’t drink it if he didn’t think it was safe, and she trusts her cousin. She looks to Bellamy, who makes one last grimace before ultimately drinking his own. 

She’s still looking at him when her vision starts to go blurry at the edges, and her knees buckle under her weight. His face is the last thing she sees before the world goes dark.

 

One of the first memories Clarke has of her father sees her in his mother’s garden while he and Anya sit at the metal table drinking tea. He’s tinkering with Anya’s toaster, because it’s on the fritz, and absently scratching at one of the cats by his feet, while Anya shoos them away from her brioches. 

Clarke is wrapping morning glory vines around her arms up to her elbows, like strange gloves. She waves so they can see. “Look! I’m a flower Oreia!” 

“Anthousae,” Anya corrects. “Daughters of the bloom.” 

Clarke snatches up one of the cats, sunbathing on a patch of untamed grass. “Now I’m a cat Oreia!”

Her father laughs, but Anya clicks her weathered tongue. Clarke sets the cat down and moves towards the stream that cuts through her grandmother’s garden. She splashes herself with the water, soaking through her clothes and making her skin slick and shining.

“Now I’m a water Oreia!” she declares.

“Okeanidae,” Anya says. “They are the oldest of our kind. Daughters of the water.”

“Fresh water,” Jake adds, fond. He doesn’t spend as much time with his mother and daughter as he would like to, always busy traveling for his work. “Haliae are saltwater Oreia. Daughters of the sea.”

“ _ Haliae _ ,” Anya corrects his pronunciation, but she looks pleased nonetheless. “They can hold their breath underwater for days, and their skin is so smooth the waves roll off them.” 

“I don’t want to be a daughter of the sea,” Clarke tells them. She’d visited the beach earlier that year, with Wells and his family. It was mostly fun, and she’d brought back a whole collection of shells and colored glass that she’d found along the shoreline, but there was too much sand, which got  _ everywhere _ , and she kept getting saltwater in her mouth. 

“Good thing you’re not, then,” her father says, amused. “You’re a daughter of the mountain.”

“Does that mean I can hold my breath in the dirt?” she asks, and he laughs so hard he startles the cat off his lap completely.

 

When Clarke comes to, she doesn’t know where she is, at first. With each blink, the dream of a memory slips away and she starts to remember the steps that led up to this moment. Lincoln stepping out of her tree; their day trip across the state; the Oreia walking towards them; the strange drink, the ticket to seeing Luna. 

Clarke glances around herself and sits up. She’s no longer outside, now laying down on the floor of a dim room she doesn’t recognize. It’s unlit, but she can still see enough to make out the shadow of a body some feet away.

“Bellamy,” she croaks, voice like loose gravel. Her skin feels stretched tight and her hair is crusted with salt, like she’s been dunked in the ocean and left out to dry on the line. She wonders if that was what the drink was for; allowing them to be transported underwater.

“Bellamy,” Clarke tries again, louder this time, and crawls over so she can shake his shoulder.

He jolts awake at her touch and stares up at her, eyes bright in the darkness. “Clarke?” His voice doesn’t sound much better, and he winces a little, reaching a hand up to prod at his head. He takes one look around the empty room and makes a face. “Warm welcome.”

Clarke huffs a laugh but doesn’t get a chance to respond before a section of the wall, which is apparently a door, opens with a groan. An Oreia stands in the doorway staring down at them, silhouetted by the red-orange light of sunset. How long had they been asleep?

“Luna will see you now,” the Oreia says, voice like water on sand. Clarke wonders if that’s just how all Haliae sound, or if it’s something special they can do, like her family’s venom.

“Where’s Lincoln?” she asks, only feeling a little guilty for not wondering about him earlier.

“He woke first,” the Oreia says, which isn’t a complete answer, but she’ll take it. 

They stand unsteadily, leaning heavily on each other for support as they get their legs working again, and then follow the Oreia out into the hall.

They’re led through a labyrinth of narrow corridors made of solid walls hinged together like joints in a ladder, building up towards a spiral staircase that they climb wordlessly. It isn’t until they breach the top, an enormous round space acting as a window, that Clarke realizes they’re in a lighthouse.

It’s bigger than it looked from the beach, but she supposes that makes sense. It was a fair distance away, and most things seem bigger on the inside. 

There are more Oreia than she was expecting; an entire community’s worth. There are adults, like the ones who met them at the pier, but there are children too, running around and laughing like any other kids might. As she looks around, Clarke notices that their skin is now the normal range of human-looking shades, no longer iridescent and shining. 

Bellamy takes her hand and squeezes to get her attention, and nods over at where Lincoln is chatting with a few Oreia across the room. He looks happy enough, and when Clarke glances around, she finds the one who led them here has disappeared into the crowd, apparently satisfied that they no longer need babysitting. She keeps hold of Bellamy’s hand and walks over to her cousin.

Lincoln smiles when he notices them, and turns to make introductions. “Clarke, Bellamy, this is Derrick and Adria. This is my cousin Clarke, and her partner Bellamy.”

Derrick and Adria nod their greetings, and it takes Clarke a moment to realize that their wariness stems not from the fact that they’re strangers, but from the fact that Bellamy is human. She catches Derrick eyeing her hand, still folded into his, and she holds on a little tighter.

It isn’t unheard of, for an Oreia to be with a human, but that doesn’t mean it’s  _ common _ . They’re lucky Bellamy was allowed into their haven at all. Historically speaking, they haven’t had the best relationship with humanity.

Derrick looks back to Lincoln, but Adria is still staring openly at them. “Are you married?” she asks. She’s tall, but has a young face. She can’t be more than eleven or twelve.

Clarke hears Bellamy choke a little and then turn it into a cough, and she bites back a smile. “No, we’re not married.”

“Okay,” Adria shrugs, and runs off to join the other children. Kids are easy to explain things to; Clarke isn’t sure why adults always make a big deal out of everything.

“Is that--common, for Oreia?” Bellamy asks, keeping his voice low so only she can hear it. Clarke looks up at him, confused.

“Is what common?”

There’s a flush spreading up the side of his neck. “Marriage.”

“Why would it be uncommon?” she asks, amused. It’s just--he seems so embarrassed, to even be  _ mentioning _ it, and she isn’t sure. It’s not like she’s going to assume he’s proposing. They’ve only known each other for a few weeks. At least, known each other in their waking lives.

“I just didn’t know if it was, like, more of a human concept or something.” 

Clarke can feel him getting defensive, so she leans in and presses a kiss to his shoulder without really thinking about it. If she thinks about it, she might do something she’ll regret, like tell him that she never even considered marriage as an option, before him.

“It depends on the individual, like most things, but yes, plenty of Oreia get married. Some even get married to humans.”

Bellamy keeps his face and voice remarkably steady. She’s sure it takes effort. She can feel his pulse heating up, where his wrist sits warm against her own. “Huh.”

Clarke bites her lip to keep from laughing. They should probably go on a date first, before they start talking about getting married.

“--but she’ll be back soon,” Lincoln says, and Clarke realizes he’s been talking to them. She feels a little guilty for getting so caught up in Bellamy, but Lincoln at least looks amused, so she doesn’t feel  _ that _ guilty. “Luna,” he repeats. “She’s out preparing the  _ kraipali _ .” 

“What is that?” Bellamy asks.

“It’s like a feast,” Clarke says. “Or a party, where we gather together in celebration.”

“What are we celebrating?”

It’s a good question, and Clarke turns to Lincoln, who raises a brow at her, like he can’t believe she doesn’t know.

“The equinox,” he says, and Clarke feels every hair on her body twitch, like they’re reacting to the word itself. “It’s the last day of summer.”

Clarke knows she looks like she’s just been struck in the face, but she can’t really help it. She’s  _ never _ forgotten an equinox; she usually feels them in her bones, the same way she always seems to know what phase the moon is in, or when it’s going to rain. It’s intrinsic. 

But--she forgot. Completely. One of the most important days of the year for the Oreia, and it  _ slipped her mind _ . If she hadn’t realized before how wrapped up she was in Bellamy and the case of Tristan Wilder, this would have done it.

“We begin at sundown,” Derrick tells them, and claps Lincoln warmly on the shoulder before leaving.

Lincoln eyes Clarke a little, and she knows he can tell what she’s thinking. “You’ve had a lot on your mind,” he says, all gentle reassurance.

“I still should have known,” she sighs. Bellamy stays quiet at her side, apparently realizing that he won’t understand whatever they’re discussing. He’s still holding her hand and she hates how much it comforts her, like a tether keeping her centered. 

But she sort of loves it too. She really should figure out what to do about him, about them, about the fact that somehow she can feel him the same way she feels the earth’s pulse through her feet. 

Just before the sun disappears completely, a bell begins to ring, echoing through the lighthouse like a churchyard. Clarke, Bellamy and Lincoln follow as the rest of the Oreia begin to file downstairs, giddy with the thought of revelry. The air is thick with warmth and excitement and Clarke lets it permeate through her skin, replacing her reproach with anticipation. She’s never been to a beachside  _ kraipali _ . 

Down in the belly of the lighthouse, the Haliae are stripping down to bathing suits, dipping their hands into buckets of iridescent paint and slathering it onto their skin like lotion. Children giggle as they paint each other’s cheeks and noses, parents clucking at them to stand still while they cover up their shoulder blades and backs. Friends and family help each other reach the places they can’t themselves, and Clarke feels an ache in her chest. Usually she has no problem with the fact that she’s the only Oreia left on her mountain, but sometimes she’ll visit family, or see something like  _ this _ , and she’ll think she might be missing more than she knows.

“It’s their  _ darseithe _ . It lets them walk through water like air,” Lincoln says, and Clarke nods. So it does work like her venom, then. A second skin.

Bellamy looks enraptured by the magic of it all. Clarke has to elbow him in the ribs, when Derrick starts to lead them out through the side, where a motorboat is waiting. 

“We could have you drink the  _ thalasaer _ again, but then you wouldn’t wake until dawn,” he jokes, starting up the motor as the rest of the Haliae step into the water, disappearing under the surface.

“Yeah, I think I’m good,” Bellamy says, and it would be more believable if he didn’t sound so wistful. 

He still hasn’t let go of Clarke’s hand. She wouldn’t mind if he held it until morning.

The beach is already crowded when their boat reaches the dock. Lincoln steps out first, and then reaches a hand out for each of them. On the sand, a pyre of driftwood burns steadily, licking up towards the stars. 

Clarke has gotten better at pyromancy over the years, but she still isn’t the best. “What do you see?” she asks Lincoln, nodding towards the flames.

He grins a little, like he’s remembering the night they first met, too. “Change, and new beginnings. Life and death. Love.” He shrugs. “Pretty typical equinox stuff.”

“Typical,” Clarke agrees, and follows the crowd towards the food.

It all seems to be marine life, either raw or fried and roasted over open fire and then laid out on the picnic tables like a buffet. Clarke’s glad that not all of it is sushi, at least. She’s never been the biggest fan of seafood, but the shrimp is battered and sweet, and she fills her stomach up with crab puffs until she thinks it might burst. Bellamy laughs when she licks the oil from her fingers, greedy.

It’s different from the mountain  _ kraipali’s _ she’s used to. There’s the smell of the salt, and the humidity that leaves a sheen of sweat on her skin even though it’s the tail-end of September. There’s the food, lighter and more oily than the heavy venison and spiced apples of her home. They don’t burn sage or mountain ash, but Luna does call the crowd to attention, so they can gather in a line at the water’s edge, feet bare and wet. 

They take hands, and Luna leads them in a prayer Clarke has never heard before. There is no mention of the grandmother tree, or the life-giving mountain. Instead, they give thanks for the sea and the caves and the moon. They speak first in English, and then a dialect that Clarke doesn’t recognize, although it’s similar to her own. Bellamy does his best to follow along, but his tongue keeps stumbling over the vowels.

The night is still relatively young when Luna calls them over.

The other revelers are enjoying themselves, scattered along the beach in small groups, drinking and laughing and eating what’s left of the dinner. They’ve built other, smaller fires along the way to crowd around, though the original pyre is still burning brightest.

Luna is sitting with Derrick at one of the smaller fires, on the fringes of the beach, far enough from the others that they won’t be bothered. Lincoln, Clarke and Bellamy sit on the sand across from them.

“You are Oreia,” Luna says, looking Clarke over. “Like Lincoln.”

Clarke frowns. “So are you.”

“I am Haliae,” she corrects. “Our kind are cousins, but not the same.”

Clarke’s thoughts stutter for a moment. She’d always known there were differences between Oreia, but she’d never considered that they were separate species. 

“So, you guys are tigers but Clarke and Lincoln are lions?” Bellamy asks, puzzling it out. “Both cats, but different breeds?”

Luna hums, which seems affirming. “We always believe ours is the correct name,” she says. “Oreia are taught that the rest of us are just  _ different _ Oreia. Haliae are taught that the rest of you are just  _ different _ Haliae. Aurai are taught that the rest of us are different Aurai.”

“Which kind is Aurai?” Bellamy asks.

“Oreia--” Clarke catches herself and shakes her head. She guesses it makes sense, in a way; everyone likes to think they’re the main character in the story. “Um, they’re daughters of the stars.”

“Those exist?” he asks, and immediately looks like he wants to take back the question, worried it might seem rude. 

“There are many of our kind,” Luna confirms. She seems amused by him, at least. “Our true name is not translatable, but the closest would be  _ Neraide _ . Daughters of fairy.”

“Why are there um,” Bellamy glances at Lincoln and Derrick. “Male  _ Neraide _ ?”

Clarke chokes on her laugh, and he pinches her thumb.

“Why are all humans called  _ mankind _ ?” Derrick asks, and Bellamy flushes.

“Touche.”

“Do you know anything about Alie? Or the  _ Lysaire _ ?” Clarke asks. Truthfully, she has at least a hundred questions for Luna, but these two seem to be the most pressing.

Luna and Derrick share a look she can’t decipher, and Clarke takes the moment to study them. Derrick is tall and broad, taller even than Lincoln, with long hair twisted up in braids tangled by the ocean. Blue ink runs like rivers down his skin, in patterns that she’s sure mean something. Beside him, Luna is less tall and broad, though still intimidating in her own right. There’s an importance in the air around her, like it shifts to let her through. Her hair is earth-red and unruly, with strands of ocean green and blue throughout. Her arms are brown and bare, with that same blue ink spiraling around her biceps. There’s a tattoo on her shoulder that looks so similar to Clarke’s family crest, they could be sisters.

“I have heard of Alie, and her cause,” Luna says slowly, like she’s picking through her words. “I don’t know much about her. Supposedly, she is the only one of her kind.”

“Supposedly?” Bellamy’s eyes are sharp, shoulders set in what Clarke has started to think of as his  _ U.S. Marshal-Zone _ . 

Luna shrugs a shoulder. “It’s hard to know how many there are, when there are so few records of us.”

“And the  _ Lysaire _ ?” Clarke asks, and she sees something flicker in Luna’s eyes, reflected in the fire.

“It is real,” she says softly. “And if it were to end up in the wrong hands, it would mean genocide. That is all I can tell you.”

“Thank you,” Lincoln says, and that seems to be the end of the conversation, because he starts to stand. Clarke and Bellamy follow suit, brushing the sand loose from their jeans and wandering off down the shoreline. 

“I have some people I need to catch up with,” Lincoln tells them, looking a little apologetic, but Clarke just waves him off. 

“We’ll be fine without you.”

He gives their linked hands a long look and then says “I’m sure you will.” Clarke shoves him.

Lincoln disappears into the crowd and Clarke lets Bellamy take the lead as they wander. Someone hands them each a cup of some kind of sweet wine, and they sip at it while they walk. She doesn’t actually notice they’ve left the beach completely until he stops, and she sees they’re in the park, amongst the trees. She can just make out the sounds of the party drifting over, and the flickering of the campfires in the distance.

Clarke tips her head back; they’re far enough from the nearest city, that she can see the stars as well as she can in Mount Weather. “I always liked your stories about the constellations best,” she decides.

“Which one?”

Clarke considers it, eyes searching for the picture she knows best. “Andromeda.”

Bellamy snorts. “Yeah, you would like that one best.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A princess sacrificing herself for her people,” he teases. “Saved at the last minute by the dashing hero--”

“Oh and I suppose  _ you’re _ the hero?”

“You’re already the self-sacrificing princess,” he says, mild. “Do you want to switch?”

Clarke pretends to think about it. “No,” she says. “I want to be both. I’ll rescue myself at the last minute.” She looks him up and down, and pretends she doesn’t notice when his eyes go dark, and glances away. “I guess I can rescue you too, while I’m at it.”

He laughs, and the moment fades. Clarke keeps her eyes on the stars, but she can feel him watching her.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, and his voice sounds cleaved open. When she looks at him, his face is raw, and suddenly every point of contact where their skin meets feels electric. “Clarke, I--”

“Don’t,” she interrupts, and kisses him. 

She shouldn’t get used to this, having him. She shouldn’t get used to the way one hand slides into her hair while the other skims the skin of her back, under her shirt. She shouldn’t get used to the way he groans into her mouth when she presses closer, or the way his tongue feels against hers. 

_ He’s going to leave _ , she thinks, even as his mouth leaves a trail of bruises down her neck like stepping stones.  _ They always leave _ . Anya, her father, Raven, Lexa, her mother. They always leave in the end, and Clarke doesn’t know how to do that, so she’s always the one left behind.

Bellamy pulls away just enough so she can get his shirt off, and then it’s a race until they’re all skin and mouths and greedy hands. She learned him slowly in her bed just some days ago, but now she  _ knows _ him and she has no interest in slow.

Bellamy looks at her like he’s the fish caught on her lure, helpless and trapped. “Clarke,” he says, and it sounds like every hymn her grandmother taught her. 

_ He’s going to break your heart _ , she tells herself, and kisses him again. She’s not the fool if she knows it’s coming.

It isn’t like it was in their dreams, or in her vision, because this time it’s  _ real _ . It’s real, and Clarke knows it’s real because it’s messy. It takes a moment for them to get the rhythm right, and Bellamy slips out at one point which makes them laugh, giddy and ridiculous. She’s not drunk, and he isn’t either, both just at the precipice, and when they finally get it right, it’s perfect. The night is warm around them, and they’re far enough from the party to pretend it’s just them, just this.

When Clarke comes, it doesn’t feel like a dream either. She holds him to her while they catch their breath.

Bellamy presses his mouth against her breast. “I’m going to say it anyway.” He tries to keep his tone light, funny, but his eyes are still an open wound.

“Don’t,” Clarke swallows. “Don’t just--not because of this, or the other night--”

Bellamy smooths his hand up around the side of her neck, stroking her jawline with his thumb. He still looks helpless, but it hurts less. He looks like he  _ wants _ to be caught. “I think I’ve loved you for longer than I know,” he says, and Clarke feels like her chest might break with how hard her heart’s beating. “I think I’ve loved you since that first dream.”

If she tells him she loves him now, before she tells him the truth about Tristan, about what she’s done--what she  _ is _ \--he will never forgive her. 

Clarke wraps her hand around his wrist, fingers pressed against his pulsepoint so she can feel his life, steady with hope. “I didn’t love you until the third one.”

His smile is everything, and for the first time since her schooldays, Clarke is profoundly grateful for her Oreia memory. At least she’ll always have this; the way his face brightens, the way he says her name, the way he holds her.

They curl up together as the night stretches, and she yawns against his neck. “Go to sleep,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I’ll see you there.”

 

Clarke wakes up naked and pressed to Bellamy’s back, fingers laced with his against his stomach. They’re still laying in the park, and she’s immediately thankful that it’s technically the off season, and they didn’t scar any children or elderly people wandering through. 

The sun is up already, bright enough that it must be mid-morning. She winces when she starts to pull away from Bellamy, sweat making their skin stick together uncomfortably. Bellamy makes a face in his sleep, and opens his eyes.

“Morning,” he says, and she kisses him. His mouth is dry and stale, but he reaches up to hold her in place, kissing back lazily, and it’s so nice it makes her ache.

She wants this. She wants this so  _ much _ and she doesn’t quite know how to breathe with it.

They pull apart eventually, finding their clothes where they’d peeled them away the night before, and then wandering back to the beach.

The Haliae are gone, along with any remnants of the  _ kraipali _ . There isn’t a single pile of driftwood ash or emptied cup littering the sand. If she didn’t know better, Clarke would assume the space had been untouched for months.

They find Lincoln waiting for them on the hood of Bellamy’s Jeep, with two cups of gas station coffee. Clarke isn’t sure where he got them, but she isn’t about to turn down caffeine. 

“Ready to go?” Bellamy asks, sounding a little more human.

Lincoln gives them a look. “I’ve been ready for hours.”

Bellamy grumbles a little, but Clarke can see his neck going red under his shirt collar. They climb into the car and he wakes up the GPS, to key in Clarke’s address. He doesn’t even make a face when she puts her feet on the dashboard. He reaches out and slides his fingers between hers, and they head home.

**Author's Note:**

> by the way, [ here's a playlist for this fic](http://8tracks.com/tierannasaurusrex/mountain-daughters) if you're interested in that sort of thing


End file.
